Smart Client Deploying with ClickOnce

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-toend 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.

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