Thanks for your presentation! You had mentioned the creation of custom package as prerequisite. What about 3rd party software as a prerequisite?

Are you doing your ClickOnce presentation for Fort Wayne's .NET group tonight? Thought I saw you scheduled on NUFW's web site (http://www.nufw.com) a week ago, but now the site appears to be down or gone.

You also mentioned the ability to use the bootstrapper withoug clickonce but all the samples pertained to ClickOnce. Do you have any information regarding using the bootstrapper without going through the Publish dialog. I noticed that there is an MsBuild task called GenerateBootstrap, is this the only way to do it? If so, do you have any samples on using it in this way?

Thanks,

Jake

Yet, one more comment/question. What about automated build scenarios? You can't very well use VS.NET to publish an app for ClickOnce. So for example, I write the installs for our product using WiX. We have nant builds that go off every night to build the product. We have a client/server application which runs completely on a service oriented architecture. So after installing the server and portal, a client could browse to the server web site and click a link to download and install the client applications. If I want to make an application for the client using ClickOnce, how do I go about integrating the publishing into the build. Because we would never know the name of the server or DNS name, we could not use a static manifest.

I see lots of examples using click once in the most basic form and usually not in any real world applications but none as I described above.

Any information would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jake,

Great questions!

First, in regards to the use of the bootstrapper without using ClickOnce... if you create a regular Setup Project in Visual Studio (to create an MSI deployment package), in the project properties you can tell it to create a "Setup.exe" program. The button right next to that check box (it says "Settings" or "Advanced" or something) will open up the exact same Bootstrapper configuration dialog that you get from the ClickOnce configuration GUI.

Second, about the automated build scenario. You are correct, there really isn't any command-line utility to perform the equivalent of a Visual Studio Publish command, at least at this time. However, it's easy enough to script that I'm sure it won't be long before all the automated build tools have scripts to handle it... (maybe you'll write one! ;)

Remember, all you need to do, to publish an application (especially after the first time), is to update the deployment manifest to point to the location of your new version (by convention, a version-named folder in the same location as the deployment manifest). Publishing is really just a matter of copying files around.

The hardest part will be generating the manifests, because Visual Studio doesn't really create these files until it does its own publish thing. Until better tools for automating the generation of these manifests from project properties exist, you'll probably want to use the MAGE tool to create them and include them into whatever build scripts you write.

This sounds like a great GotDotNet workspace project to me!

Hi Ken thanks for the info.

I found the following documentation on MSDN which lists the MSBuild target required to publish from the command line.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/ms165431(en-us,vs.80).aspx

As for using the bootstrap. I see what you are saying but honestly, how many real world software packages use the setup project from VS. I know that it is getting better but there is a reason why the Office team uses WiX instead of VS.NET Setup Project. With that said, I suppose I could create a dummy setup project just to create the bootstrap.

Thanks,

Jake