we would probably like to show off some of our work. How can you share your Visual Basic programs with others? Well, you can always bring someone over to your computer, open your Visual Basic project, and press F5 or click the right-arrow button on the toolbar to run your program.

What you probably want to do is to give your friend, spouse, or client a floppy disk with one file that she could run to view and use your program. Or maybe you can send him your program over a network, maybe through email, or, better yet, post it on your Web site. Hey, that would be really cool!

Most of the programs that you will learn to build can be distributed in one file. However, sometimes one file is not enough. Microsoft does provide a Packaging and Deployment Wizard for these types of situations. To run your Visual Basic program outside of the design-time IDE, you need to compile your project into an executable file. This process takes your project’s files and turns their information into machine code that is contained in one executable file (exe). Once you create an executable file, it can be distributed and accessed by double-clicking it or opening it in a Microsoft environment such as Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows Millennium, or Windows 2000.

To compile your project, simply click the File menu and select Make *.exe, where the asterisk (*) represents the name of your project. Begin the compiling process as seen in the following Figure




This process opens a new window where you can specify the location and name of your executable file. You can also click the Options button to change the version numbers of your program.