As I mentioned in an earlier entry , LightSwitch Beta 2 added the ability to sign an application . This can be accomplished on the "Specify a Certificate" page of the publish wizard. But why would anyone want to sign their application? What good does...

I haven't written a blog post for quite a while. Since my last blog entry, I moved from working on ClickOnce tooling to LightSwitch . I am still working on deployment stuff, so now you know who to blame. I meant to write a quick overview of LightSwitch...

One of the features Visual Studio provides when publishing is the generation of a web page that serves as an installation entry point of a ClickOnce application. It describes some information about the application, application requirements, and even includes...

Here is a post I've been meaning to do for a while, but avoided because there is some MSDN info on it. But a recent question to the forums made me think that maybe it was time to talk about things that were not addressed in the document: what's really...

In addition to output from a "compile", projects are capable of creating other outputs. Setup projects can consume the output from other projects, package them up, and install them as part of the generated Windows Installer package. These groups of different...

Have you ever noticed that when your application has a web reference, and you go to publish that web reference, the expected XmlSerializers assembly is not written into the application manifest, nor is it deployed with the application? You haven't? Not...

Every one in a while on our ClickOnce forums, we are asked how to publish files that aren't part of the project. The short answer is: you can't. The ClickOnce project is only capable of publishing files (build output, data, or content files) which are...

There are all sorts of publishing properties available to the Visual Studio developer. Visual Studio tries to set the properties to reasonable default values. But with all things that are defaulted, the values are right for some people, but wrong for...

I apologize for taking so long between posts. I have an excuse: very busy working on Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Beta) . For those of you who have downloaded the beta , this post won't do you much good, as the ability to set file associations for ClickOnce...

A little-known feature that made it into .NET Framework 3.5 is the ability for a ClickOnce application to be associated with document extensions. That is, once properly configured, double-clicking on a document can cause your ClickOnce application to...

A long time ago, when I was trying to look up some piece of information for some blog entry, I stumbled upon a neat site for MSBuild tasks: the MSBuild Community Tasks site. There are several useful build tasks in there, one of which will be the focus...

For completeness sake, I decided to add the postbuild step for using a modified bootstrapper to launch a ClickOnce deployment manifest (.application) file using Internet Explorer. As I detailed here , the original use for this change was to work-around...

In the previous blog entry , I went over the design and implementation of a modified bootstrapper which accepts command-line parameters. For example the bootstrapper which shipped with Visual Studio 2005 is not capable of "doing the right thing" for the...

Introduction A common complaint about the bootstrapper that shipped with Visual Studio 8 is that it does not accept command-line parameters for launching the MSI. For example, lots of people want to turn on verbose logging or quiet install. The reason...

The last step in the Vista-related improvements I outlined several months ago involves improving the bootstrapper experience on Vista. The problem is that running the bootstrapper on Vista gives a UAC elevation prompt as soon as it is launched. Despite...

A little while after I published my fake mailbag question , I decided to change my blog settings so that email and comments posted to the blog would be forwarded to my work email address. The blog automatically posts some comments, but it turns out a...

Last time , I created an installer with a shortcut in the user's start menu to a very simple application. Once that application is installed, it should be possible to right-click the shortcut and select "Run As Administrator" if you wanted to run the...

If I had any blog readership and a place to send questions to, I anticipate one would look something like this: (From the mailbag): I've created some cool new games that I want people to be able to run. I want each game to appear as a separate entry...

Can the steps from last time be improved? You bet! First off, I absolutely hate that I had to convert the hex value of 0x00800000 just to appease int.Parse. To wit: < Target Name = " PostBuild " > < Select MsiFileName = " $(BuiltOutputPath...

A style guideline within Vista is to add a shield icon to a button when pressing the button results in an action which requires elevation. For example, to change the date and time on the system clock, you are presented with a dialog that looks like this...

( Continued... ) Here is what has been accomplished so far in this grand No Impersonate plan: Grab all entries in the Custom Action table Decide which of these entries are deferred Update the deferred entries to include the no impersonate...

As I mentioned last time , deferred custom actions are generally no impersonate. In this entry, I hope to expand on the postbuild steps to change enable all deferred custom actions in an msi into no impersonate. Doing this via jscript isn't overly...

In case you haven't noticed, there are a couple of gaps within setup projects regarding how the generated MSIs work on Vista. Allow me to give you a roadmap of where I hope to take this blog to plug some of these holes. If you thought Windows Installer...

( Continued... ) Let's instead add each test to its own project file. Hopefully then the Items scope won't end up clashing with each other. And let's be a little more careful about the side-effects of the tests. Instead of always working with the master...

Even though its only been two blog posts since I first wrote it , I'm ready to change how the Select task was implemented. One thing that bothered me when I wrote it was that I made it mandatory to pass the columns the user wanted. As a result, if someone...