Publishing from a ClickOnce deployment project

[Guest]

How do you publish from a deployment project? I know how to publish from the
solution (right-click select publish and use the publish wizard) but now I
want to do the same steps automatically in a deployment project. If I need
to use a custom action, what do I actually need to do within the custom
action to get the application to publish.

 

[Andy]

Just copy the files and create the application and deployment
manifests.

Why would you want to do this as a deployment project? ClickOnce is
the deployment method, therefore a deployment project should be
unneeded (I would think).

 

[Guest]

We need to be able to give an msi to a customer, who can then set up a
deployment site on their own internal web server. We cannot re-publish for
every customer that we sell to. Hence the need to be able to publish from a
deployment project.

 

[Andy]

Well, that makes sense.

I'm sure you can do this in an MSI... you'll have to do the work to
create the clickonce deployment yourself. Your MSI would then just
basically take the files and drop them to some location. You'd also
have to create a custom action to create the vdir. So some of it will
be a manual process (generating the manifests, renaming files if need
be, gathering them in one spot).