Following on from this post I wanted to see if I could get my Client Profile installation to work with ClickOnce. To be honest, I struggled quite a bit with this.

Sticking with my “Hello World” WPF application, I made sure that on the Publish tab of my projects’ properties I had selected what to do about pre-requisites;

and then I altered a few paths to point the ClickOnce process to my web server and told VS to publish it. The publishing process looks to drop out what you’d expect in terms of pushing out the .application file for ClickOnce deployment but you’ll find that if you point someone to a .application file and they have IE7 without any .NET Framework then they get a dialog from IE7 saying something like;

Hey – you don’t have the .NET Framework. Would you like me to go and get it for you and install it?

This is not what I want to do here because it springs off into downloading the full .NET Framework ( 3.5 I think but perhaps that’ll be updated to Sp1? ) from the web which means the 60MB download and then the reboot.

However, the publication process also drops out Setup.exe which is our old friend, the online bootstrapper.

If I run Setup.exe then it’ll first off go through the process of installing the .NET Client Profile again and then it’ll follow that up with a ClickOnce installation of my application. Quite cool 🙂

Naturally, if I then update my application and re-publish it ( assuming that I asked the application to check for updates in the first place ) then the application will do the usual ClickOnce thing of picking up updates as/when they’re published to the installation server.

Next stop is how to customise this setup process.