Help Needed: project deployment.

[Andrew S. Giles]

Hello everyone,

I am trying to deploy a project, and I cannot get it to work. Does anyone
have any ideas how I should be going about this, since the way I am
attempting is obviously wrong.

Here is the situation.

I have the following things that need to be installed.
Monitor - C# Windoes Forms application [.exe]
Collector - Unmanaged C++ application [.exe]
COMClient - Library (.lib) used by Collector to allow communication [.lib]
Q3KComms - COM server to do communication between Collector and Monitor [.exe]
Q3KCommsPS - Proxy/Stubs needed to allow communiaitons between Collector and
Monitor. [.dll]

I attempted to put all of these projects into the Monitor Solution, and from
there build a Setup application to install them all. I defined my directory
structure as I wanted it (setting up the executable into 3 folders, Monitor,
Server, Collector with the .lib in the Collector folder), set a custom action
to handle the post build step for the Q3KComms exe (/RegServer action here),
and even set up the Q3KCommsPS.dll as self registering (I think, it was a
registration property set to selfregister).

I install things fine, the exe are in the right spot, the registry shows the
Q3KComms server in the place where I set it up... but the application does
not run. It crashes. When I start moving into the debugger (it is a release
version... so assembly language fun) it tells me that there is a fileNotFound
exception... Interop.Q3KComms or one of its dependencies is not found.

Now, the Monitor has a reference to Q3KComms in it... but it points to the
directory path in my development area.... I tried resetting this to the new
path, and running, but it didnt work either.

How should I be going about this? What am I setting up wrong? Do I need to
do something special/important to the server in order to be able to see it
and use it from the new directory structure (ie the new machine)

Should I be doing this from one install package, or multiple packages? I
think one is best, but it hasnt been working.

Can someone help me figgure out what I need to do?

Andrew S. Giles