ClickOnce Experiments
Finally had a chance this weekend to play around with the Click Once capability in Visual Studio 2005.
It’s really cool to be able to publish from VS2005 and have it automagicly create the virtual on the target web server and setup to serve a page to allow users to download the application. I’m sure that action will catch some users off guard. It almost seems like it should prompt you before creating a new virtual.
If you’re like me and only look at the read me after things don’t work you will realize that on Windows Sever 2003 you will need to manually add mime types for .Application and one other extension so all the magic happens – otherwise you will get a 404 error code when you click the install button.
I also got to play with the MAGE utility (Manifest Generation and Editing Tool) there’s a workaround that if you don’t plug in your company name when you install the O/S the publisher in the manifest is blank and reportedly causes a failed deploy. You can access MAGE from the VS command line.
I tried installing the application on a box that already had an older version of the framework and it got upset because I was trying to install an application that required a newer version. Knowing you have a problem is the first step, its recovery of telling me there was a problem can use more work.
On a clean machine without the framework it downloads the redistribution files and tries to update to .NET 2.0 before installing the application. Looks like on this machine it will require a reboot – so with that note I’m going to conclude this post!