I have an office application that I would like to publish from a network
location, that gets backed up, and offer updates to users as they become
available. Apparently this is exactly what "click once" does.
Since this is a small office, I have little need for code security, and
would prefer to do without the signing/certificate/expiration hassles.
Do I need to use signing at all? Is there a way to shut it off?
Can someone offer advice, or point me to a website that might?
Thanks
Al G
I've used click once deployment. It's really nice and easy. The way it
works is you "publish" your application (publish tab on the project
properties) and it creates a web page you can stick on your Intranet
(or you can dump in a network folder) and users can open the web page
and click on the link and all the software is installed automatically
(including a hefty .NET framework download from MS if necessary).
After that your program is installed.
The start menu link for the application however isn't a standard short-
cut, it's a special "thing" that launches an application to see if you
have published a new version of your application. It then installs the
newer version automatically. It works very simply and is really good.
There are two problems I had with it however:
1) You don't get a real start menu short-cut for the application
which means you can't put an command line arguments into the
application. In fact, unless your application is registered with a
file type, there's no point implementing them at all.
2) You can't uninstall the application easily. I think you have to log
on to each machine as the administrator one by one and remove it from
Add/Remove Applications. If you change your mind and say you want to
start using MSI's or another installation program, you won't
automatically update or remove the old "click once" application. You
do need to remove them manually.
However a side from those smaller issues, it does exactly what it says
on the tin and works fine.
Publishing is simple. You fill out the box and hit publish now and it
builds the web page and special installer for you, it takes seconds
and the best thing about it, is if you take a slack approach to the
development, (i.e. lots of tiny versions rather than big incremental
improvements) it's nice and fast and easy. I spent an hour turning the
web page it generated for me into a beautiful how-to document but when
I hit publish it regenerated the file and I lost the text (which was
again, a small pain).
I would definitively recommend it in a small place, as long you are
aware of those issues I have mentioned above.
Good Luck
Phill
