Deploying to the masses

The preceding deployment method is all that you need to get the check-in policy working. It doesn't seem like much, but it's frustrating to get a message saying that you are missing some components required to check some code in. Now, if we were to request every developer to build the code on their machine and then follow the deployment steps shown, or even copy the compiled bits from somewhere and then manually install it, there would be some problems.

So, an easy way of making this a slightly easier experience is by using the installation instructions property as we did and then pointing the user to an install directory. Let's put together a small installer that we can use. The first thing we will do is go to the registry and export the registry settings for the check-in policy key so that we can get a .reg file that can be run by us and can add the entries back into the registry, or at least update them. You should see something like this:

Windows Registry Editor...