Packaging Win32 applications
Packaging into Win32 will be your primary method of application deployment, so this recipe is an important one to follow.
Getting started
Before we do any packaging, we need to keep our application source code tidy so that we can easily work out what is what when we need to update that weird and wonderful application in 2 years!
Important note
The packaging tool will grab every file in the Source directory you point it to, so make sure that the directory only has source files in it. If you point it at your Downloads folder, for example, you will find yourself wondering why a 2 MB installer is showing as 45 GB when packaged!
The packaging tool creates an intunewin file, which is effectively an encrypted ZIP file that uploads with a manifest into Azure Blob storage. When installing, your computer downloads, decrypts, and runs the installation specified.
This is entirely personal preference, but this folder layout works well:
