Comments on: ClickOnce is harder than it seems

By: Neil Arnold

Neil Arnold — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:03:00 +0000

I may be missing something, but in this case what is the point of .exe.config files?
I can enter some application settings into them, which get deployed with the application. Great, however on most production systems the settings will change dependant upon the environment. As an example, I connect to a database for storage – the connection string changes for every deployment I have, but is the same for every user. I don’t want the users changing the settings themselves thus don’t want to put it into user settings, I would have thought the .exe.config file was perfect for it, edit on deploy then update the app through click once. But no, clickonce will overwrite the .exe.config file when it updates, thus what’s the point? I may as well hard code the settings into the exe itself if the settings can’t be edited once deployed? Or am I missing something?

Neil.

By: Shylesh C

Shylesh C — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 10:45:40 +0000

If you really want to edit/replace the config files, please dont create hash values for those files. This may help you to solve your problem. But on the other hand, you will not be able to sign your deployment manifest with a publisher certificate.

Thank you

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 04 May 2006 21:08:35 +0000

You might find this helpful: http://blog.gatosoft.com/PermaLink,guid,d0a0dd1e-c9ac-4fa9-a408-615454d49702.aspx

By: breichelt

breichelt — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 08:55:53 +0000

Sam, I totally agree with you, its a huge pain in the ass to change config settings once its deployed. I definitely got more than I bargained for

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 05:03:56 +0000

It’s great for rapid/agile development and deployment into UAT, but useless for production deployment & configuration management. No-one wants to open up VS and republish just to change a config file setting – it’s no better than hardcoding settings as constants within the assembly.

Perhaps a clickonce admin tool (or a clickonce setup project) would be the answer – something much simpler than mageUI that even our admins could use.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 08:53:05 +0000

It amazes me that you can not add existing files to the list of Application Files that get deployed. For example, one of my cab modules contains an xslt that needs deployed, so I was forced to add a linked file in my main executable project.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 11:49:25 +0000

Check out Mage/MageUI.. They might help…

http://coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com/2006/04/mageui-can-be-your-clickonce-stage-to.html

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 11:46:44 +0000

I think overall ClickOnce is “good enough” but definately there are areas for improvement. I understand that it does not allow you to change config files since it creates a hash with all the files included in publish. Once thing you can do is to remove the app.config from the Application files and add manually. And as far as copying files around goes you can setup a frontpage extension at the web server have a login and publish directly to it. It will save the copying process.

I have

By: breichelt

breichelt — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 20:16:54 +0000

why do you think ClickOnce is a piece of crap?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 19:13:48 +0000

Am I the only person who thinks that ClickOnce is a piece of crap?