Configuring for a Setup Project
Eventually, it comes time to transfer your project to the production or quality assurance (QA) computer. In theory, you should just need to copy some files to the other computer. In practice, it's a lot safer to create a setup project that packages up everything you need and unpackages it on the other computer.
You do want to rebuild your setup project every time you're going to release your application; you don't need to rebuild your setup project every time you build your application. The difference between when you need to rebuild your setup project and when you don't comes down to your compile mode: Are you compiling in release mode or debug mode?
When you're working on your application, you want to compile in debug mode so that you can step through your code; when you're ready to release your application (even if it's just to the QA computer), you'll want to compile in release mode so that you get all the optimizations possible. It's only in release mode that you'll need to rebuild your setup project.
You can get Visual Studio to take care of this for you: Go to Visual Studio's Build menu and select the Configuration Manager choice. In the upper left hand corner of the resulting dialog, you'll see a dropdown list set to Debug. This indicates that the settings being displayed are the ones applied during a debug compile. Find your setup project in the list in the bottom part of the dialog and uncheck the checkbox in the Build column (you should also pick a setting for how your setup project is to be built in the Configuration column).
With your Debug settings in place, switch the dropdown list from Debug to Release. After this change, make sure that the Build option for your setup project is checked (you could also uncheck the Build option for your test project because you probably don't need to rebuild it for a release mode compile). With your release mode settings made, click the Close button to save your changes and you're done.
From now on, you just have to remember to switch the dropdown list in Visual Studio's toolbar from Debug to Release when you need a new version of your setup project (and switch the list back to Debug immediately after you generate the setup project so that you get debugging support in your compiles).
Posted by Peter Vogel on 03/19/2015