Smart Client Deployment with ClickOnce Deploying Windows Forms Applications with ClickOnce

by Noyes, Brian

• ISBN13: 9780321197696
• ISBN10: 0321197690
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-12-27
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional

Summary

The most complete source of information anywhere on ClickOnce, a new tool from Microsoft that eases deployment of .NET applications.

Author Biography

Brian Noyes is a software architect, trainer, writer, and speaker with IDesign, Inc. (www.idesign.net), a premier .NET architecture and design consulting and training company. He is a Microsoft Regional Director (www.microsoft.com/rd) and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), and has been developing software systems for more than sixteen years. He speaks at many major software conferences around the world, and writes for a variety of software journals and magazines. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia, but is a Southern California surf bum at heart, having grown up there. Prior to becoming a full-time software developer, Brian flew F-14 Tomcats in the U.S. Navy and graduated from the Navy Fighter Weapons School (TopGun) and the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School. Brian has a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Colorado, Boulder, a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School, and a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction to Click Once

Initial Deployment with Click Once

Automatic Application Updates

On-Demand Updates

Application and Data File Management

Click Once Security

Prerequisite Deployment with the Bootstrapper

Advanced Click Once Topics

Click Once Deployment of WPF Applications

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Deployment has been a thorn in most developers' sides for a long time. Developing complex distributed applications is challenging enough just from a design and implementation perspective. Failing to plan for deployment or having the deployed environment change on you can kill an application quickly, no matter how well you plan for it. ClickOnce does not solve this problem, but it definitely takes a big step in the right direction for streamlining deployment of smart client applications.I was first exposed to ClickOnce more than three years ago at an early adopter lab on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. At the time, I was just starting to get immersed in smart client technology and beginning to think about how to address all aspects of the application lifecycle as an architect. Having experienced a fair amount of deployment pain myself in the past, I instantly fell in love with ClickOnce as a technology. I quickly saw the potential for ClickOnce to be a key enabler for the broad adoption of smart client architectures because without a way to get those smart client applications in your users' hands, you might as well not build them.The most common question that I got as I was working on this book was, "How can you write a whole book on ClickOnce?" This usually came from someone who had seen demos of ClickOnce but had not yet tried to use it for something real. ClickOnce is incredibly powerful, yet it seems simple on the surface. It takes only five to ten minutes to run an end-to-end demo of what ClickOnce can do for you. When people have seen this kind of presentation of ClickOnce, they do not realize that ClickOnce addresses a lot more than a single common deployment scenario. However, whenever you try to provide flexibility and power, a fair amount of complexity also comes along with it.I think the ClickOnce team did a really good job of making the simple, straightforward use of ClickOnce as easy as possible. If you are building a new smart client application from scratch with ClickOnce in mind, using ClickOnce to deploy it requires minimal effort for both your administrators and your users. However, real applications are rarely simple and straightforward (even though, because of poor architecture, the complexity is often unnecessary or disproportionate to what the applications are designed to do). ClickOnce has many variations and options that let you address a broad range of scenarios to deal with those complexities. And once you start getting into those capabilities, you dive into the deep end of the ClickOnce pool and really need to understand a lot more about what is going on under the covers; what the effects are of setting publishing, update, and security options different from the defaults; how your application is going to behave in the ClickOnce runtime environment; and so on. Who Should Read This Book?This book is written for those developers and architects who need to understand the full range of capabilities of ClickOnce so that they can make educated decisions early in the development lifecycle and put those decisions into practice when the product is getting close to complete. You will need this understanding to make sure you can get your smart client applications deployed through ClickOnce and to address the complexities of real-world applications in that environment. It is primarily written for intermediate to advanced developers or architects, but IT professionals who are responsible for deploying and maintaining ClickOnce applications can also get a lot out of most of the chapters as well.This is not a book about programming, although there are aspects of ClickOnce covered in several of the chapters that require coding to use. ClickOnce is mainly driven through Visual Studio project configuration, tools, and processes, not through code. So a fair percentage of the book will describe these aspects, and only a small portion wi