My Experience With HelloWorld and ClickOnce

Well I thought it was high time to check out ClickOnce with the 2.0 framework so I created myself a little HelloWorld application and I was off!   Ahhhh not so quick.

First my environment.

Server

• Windows Server 2003
• Latest service packs
• IIS 6
• 1.1 Framework
• 2.0 Framework not installed 

Publishing

• VB.Net application, 1 small winform with a button
• I used the publish wizard and published via FTP as I did not want to configure the Front Page Server Extensions at the time

Setting The Mime Types

Well if you install the 2..0 framework I believe it will configure the Mime types in IIS for you.  Again, in my case I had not installed it so I had to configure them manually.

You need to add the following Mime Types

• .application (application/octet-stream)
• .manifest (application/x-ms-application)
• .deploy (application/x-ms-application)

So got thru that pretty easily doing a search and my ClickOnce application installed and ran like a charm.

THEN I tried to install it on a machine that did not have the 2.0 framework just to see how the bootstrapper worked.  My long day began. I would get a 404 (file not found) I tried a number of things in cluding adding a Mime type of */application-octet-stream) with no luck.

Searching and searching I found the answer. When I created the new virtual directory on the server I set the Scripts and Execurable permission. This is where I screwed up.  To get the bootstrap to run you can only have the Script set NOT the Execurable. When setting it up I thought well I want setup.exe to run so I need the Executable permission. Not so.

Well hours later I am a happy camper and ClickOnce rocks! Hope you find this post if you are having the same pain as myself!