ClickOnce Deployment Fundamentals

I'm delighted to announce that my sixth Pluralsight course, ClickOnce Deployment Fundamentals is now live. In it I go through all the options available for customising your ClickOnce deployment, as well as how to handle updates, the capabilities of the deployment API, and what gets stored where on the disk. I also have modules covering some of the more advanced parts of ClickOnce such as handling pre-requisites with the bootstrapper, signing your deployment, and using the MAGE tool.

Why ClickOnce?

You may be surprised that I'm doing a course on ClickOnce, since it is now a fairly old and oft-maligned technology. As I explain in the course, it's not the right choice for all installers, but for simple .NET applications, it may actually prove to be the simplest solution for keeping your application automatically up to date. I go through some of the pros and cons in the course, as well as pointing out a few alternatives you might want to consider.

Some ClickOnce Resources

I've tried to give a fairly comprehensive coverage of ClickOnce capabilities in the course, but you can't cover everything, so here's some of what I consider to be the most helpful resources if you are planning to use it yourself.

• RobinDotNet Robin is one of the few genuine ClickOnce experts out there on the web, and she has provided several really helpful articles, including things like how you can host your ClickOnce deployments in Azure blob storage.
• MSDN - MSDN may not be the most thrilling documentation to read, but don't overlook it when it comes to ClickOnce, as it is really the only comprehensive source of information you’ll find. Have a look here and here for some useful material.
• Smart Client Deployment book by Brian Noyes. This really is the best book out there on ClickOnce. Don’t be put off by the fact that it is fairly old now. ClickOnce hasn’t changed an awful lot though, so pretty much everything in the book is still relevant.
• Finally here’s a video that discusses re-signing with MAGE, which shows how to work around a nasty gotcha when re-signing if you are using .deploy file extensions (which you probably are if deploying via the web).

More to Come on Signing…

I’m also hoping to follow this up with another post about the process of signing your ClickOnce applications. I actually attempted to buy my own code signing certificate which I wanted to use in my demos in this course, but it has proved surprisingly difficult to complete the purchase of my certificate (certainly a story for a future blog post), so for the course I just used a self-generated certificate. As soon as I finally get the real deal, I’ll post showing what difference it makes to the warnings you receive during installation when your app is signed by a certificate issued by a trusted Certificate Authority.