What's going on with ClickOnce

[GaryDean]

One of our developers has been asking questions about ClickOnce on many of
these forums and basically not getting any answers. also I notice that I
could not find a single ClickOnce Demo anywhere on the internet - not even
microsoft sites related to ClickOnce. Plenty of talk and demos on how to
develop and deploy but no demos.

Also, our developer was asking about how to call the backend database from a
ClickOnce deployed app. not a single answer.

Is the technology dead? What's going on with ClickOnce?

(please don't reply to this message with hype on how neat Framework 3.0 will
be because that's still beta because I'm just looking for answers regarding
ClickOnce in 2.0 - thanks)

 

[mabster]

One of our developers has been asking questions about ClickOnce on many of
these forums and basically not getting any answers. also I notice that I
could not find a single ClickOnce Demo anywhere on the internet - not even
microsoft sites related to ClickOnce. Plenty of talk and demos on how to
develop and deploy but no demos.

Also, our developer was asking about how to call the backend database from a
ClickOnce deployed app. not a single answer.

Is the technology dead? What's going on with ClickOnce?

(please don't reply to this message with hype on how neat Framework 3.0 will
be because that's still beta because I'm just looking for answers regarding
ClickOnce in 2.0 - thanks)

http://www.madprops.org/comicster

I've been using ClickOnce with Comicster since beta 2 of the 2.0
framework, and it simply rocks.

There are some code samples and stuff on my blog, too, if you're interested:

http://www.madprops.org/cs/blogs/mabster/archive/tags/clickonce/default.aspx

Cheers,
Matt

 

[Norman Yuan]

If you use VS2005, ClickOnce deploy/publish is just very simple thing of a
few clicks on the VS2005 project's "Properties" form. Create a simple "Hello
World" Win form app and try it out. It may only takes your developer a few
minutes.

As for accessing backend database, I saw a post few days ago, which might be
from your developer. Well, data access has little to do with ClickOnce.
ClickOnce is a way of deploying a developed app, not developing the app.
That could be the reason that no one replying to that post. To access
database, the app (Win Form app) can use any available approach, whether it
will be deployed in ClickOnce or in other way.

 

[GaryDean]

Norman,
thanks for your reply...

I know it's easy to deploy a simple Win Form App, maybe one that plays
tic-tac-toe, via ClickOnce. But in the real world almost all applications
have to make calls to databases as do ASP.Net apps make calls to databases
back on the server.

As far as I can tell, there is no dialog going on anywhere on best practices
on doing this. This might mean that no one is writing real apps using
ClickOnce. Can we make an ObjectDataSource bind remotely? do we have to
use WebServices or Remoting?

 

[GaryDean]

Matt,
Thanks for the reply and I'm glad to hear that your have had success with
ClickOnce deployed Forms Apps....

Since any application of substance would need to connect to a backend
database can you tell me how you make the connect? Have you a way to do
remote binding to a datagrid or objectdatasource? How do you update the
database tables back on the server? How do you call stored procedures on
the backend database?

 

[Linda Liu [MSFT]]

Hi Gary,

ClickOnce is a new technology in VS 2005, which means there're a lot of
places needing improvement in this technology. Many technology compositions
on the internet only talk about the simple usages of ClickOnce. But I
believe the technology of ClickOnce will be better and better and there
will be more and more resources about this technology on the internet.

As for your question on how to call the backend database from a ClickOnce
deployed application, the simplest way is to connect to the database using
SQL Server Authentication, instead of Windows Authentication in the
application. Thus, wherever the application is deployed, it will access the
same database. If you need to update the data tables or stored procedures
on the backend database, just do them in the database. The updates will be
seen by the application when it restarts.

Hope this helps.
If you have anything unclear, please feel free to let me know.


Sincerely,
Linda Liu
Microsoft Online Community Support

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[mabster]

Matt,
Thanks for the reply and I'm glad to hear that your have had success with
ClickOnce deployed Forms Apps....

Since any application of substance would need to connect to a backend
database can you tell me how you make the connect? Have you a way to do
remote binding to a datagrid or objectdatasource? How do you update the
database tables back on the server? How do you call stored procedures on
the backend database?

Comicster maintains personal collection files (which are just DataSets
serialized to XML) on the user's hard drive, so no back-end database is
necessary.

Having said that, I ended up building in a server-side database so that
users could share data, and I connect to that via web services.

Anyway - like someone else said: ClickOnce is just a deployment
mechanism. How you talk to a back-end database has nothing to do with
how you choose to deploy your exe. Doesn't matter if you're doing direct
calls to a SQL Server instance or if you're doing business objects over
carrier pigeon - ClickOnce doesn't enter into it.

 

[Patrice]

Whatever you can do with an usual application. AFAIK a network deployed
application is able to talk with its originating site using a web service.
You could also talk directly to your DB (but this may require additional
rights). Likely depends on which audience you are targeting...

In which group did he asked ?

 

[Norman Yuan]

I think you may be confused with "Smart Client" and "ClickOnce" here.
ClickOnce is just a way to deploy a Win form application, it has nothing to
do with how backend data source is accessed.

Smart client, on the other hand, refers to Win form app (or, more
accurately, fat client app) that can smartly (depending on the design)
connect to different data source/services automatically or
semi-automatically, or manually, can efficiently use available distributed
processing resources, ...Whether you use relational data source or object
data source, whether you use remoting or web services, all depends on your
needs abd avaialble resources (and the developers' skill/knowledge). Again,
those things has little to do with ClickOnce. Of cource, there may be some
factors how the app would be deployed affecting the app's design.

 

[Chris Dunaway]

As far as I can tell, there is no dialog going on anywhere on best practices
on doing this. This might mean that no one is writing real apps using
ClickOnce. Can we make an ObjectDataSource bind remotely? do we have to
use WebServices or Remoting?

As others have pointed out, ClickOnce deployment of the app has no
bearing on the data access mechanism. A ClickOnce application is
installed locally on the users hard drive. The only difference being
that whenever the user starts the app, it may chech the deployment
server for newer versions. But ClickOnce should have no effect on your
data access strategy.

We generally use a .config file to contain our connection strings so
that the app can connect to the server.

Good Luck

 

[GaryDean]

Linda,
Thanks to you and others that have responded to this thread. This has been
a very useful discussion for me.

Gary