Matias Woloski’s Blog

Lately, I’ve been wondering about the strength of ClickOnce
applied in enterprise applications. In these scenarios, the deployment of a
Smart Client application involves more than a simple XCOPY. Let’s enumerate
some of them:

• multiple environments (dev,
  qa, staging, production)
• prerequisites
• CAS permissions
• run as non-admin
• pre and post-deployment
  tasks
• partial deploys (only a set
  of modules)
• rollbacks
• segmented deploy (e.g. only
  deploy a beta testers group)
• versioning

The truth is that ClickOnce has been designed with some of
these things in mind out of the box but not all of them. Fortunately the ClickOnce
world does not finish in the “Visual Studio 2005 Publish tab”.  We have MSBuild
tasks,
mage.exe
and mageui.exe
to overcome the advanced scenarios.
A great
sample showing the advanced features has been written by Mike Bouck.

Based on this and my previous post about dynamic
modules, I’m planning to write a sample consisting of a CAB application leveraging ClickOnce
and CAB Module Loader to download
modules on-demand and load them dynamically.

My Blog has been moved… This is the new url: http://blogs.southworks.net/blogs/matiaswoloski