I work in a service organization where users of our internal tools are often disconnected. It is often the case that service engineers on service assignments are "stranded" with an outdated version of some internal tool.
These tools are deployed using ClickOnce publish VS2010 .NET4 . If the users run all their apps while still connected to corporate network, they would get a notification that a new version was available. As the number of various tools increase, the chance increases that some app is not updated.
Is it possible to automate this process, by a batch file or something?
So that the engineers just need to run one file when connected to corporate nw to get all the newest versions of their installed tools?
Added:
An easier way of saying it would be to have "something like Windows update" operating on corporate net, but for internal ClickOnce apps.
Very interesting question. I can't think of a quick way to do this, but it's definitely possible.
I would create another ClickOnce app whose job is to update the other ClickOnce apps. This app needs the url of each app's .application file. If all engineers are supposed to have all apps, that's easy. If not, maybe you could look through their start menu and find all the ClickOnce Application Reference files. Those files contain the url.
Next, just launch the url and pass a query string argument...
http://server/MyApp/MyApp.application?UpdateOnly=true
In the startup of your applications, you can check the query string argument and shut down the app if it's run with UpdateOnly=true.
One side note. If you set the minimum required version of each of your apps to the latest version, users won't get prompted with the new version dialog. Seems like you'd want to do that or the user would still have to pay attention and do a lot of clicking.
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We have a c#, .NET 4.0, windows application which we deploy to a terminal server. (Developed using VS 2010). This application makes use of several WCF services sitting on another server.
Our users access the front-end via remote desktop session. (They all have a .RDP file on their desktops.)
My question is regarding the deployment of this front-end. Currently, if we need to do an emergency deployment during business hours, we need to kick all the users off that are hooked into the app (as they are using the dll's that we need to replace). This is not ideal, obviously. We work in quite a business-critical environment, so these deployments are unavoidable. I've investigated ClickOnce, but have read that you cannot use this with terminal services application here. (Which kind of makes sense since it's essentially one app being "accessed" by several clients...)
I would like to be able to do a "silent" deployment whereby the user knows nothing about the fix until they restart their instance of the application. I'm not sure this is even possible?
I would appreciate any guidance or suggestions on this!
Yep, I do this all the time with a RD app -- you just need to move or rename the DLLs instead of deleting them. Windows allows moves and renames when DLLs are in use, but prevents you from deleting them. If you use Windows Installer to deploy your app, it will do the moves automatically (and delete the old versions when the system is next rebooted).
Once you replace the DLLs this way, existing sessions will continue to use the old, renamed versions, and new sessions will use the new versions. Of course, depending on how many DLLs you have, how long it takes your app to load them into memory, and how much activity you have on your server, you could run into a scenario where the app loads some of the old DLLs and some of the new ones when you're in the middle of updating them, but that would likely be rare.
I've developed a WPF application. A large company is trying to make my application available to users' desktops. The traditional way to do this would be to point the users' browsers to:
http://www.MySite.com/MyApp.application
But the I.T. group at this company has configured their proxy server in such a way so as to block .application files for security reasons. They do, however, allow .exe files to pass through their proxy server and execute on client workstations. The irony of allowing .exe's from the Internet while blocking .application text files "for security reasons" isn't wasted on me but let's put that aside for a moment.
What kind of workaround would you recommend that would allow my app to launch from client desktops given that .EXEs are allowed? My first thought is to write a mini launcher app that does nothing more than download a .zip'd version of the .application file and all dependencies to a temp folder on the user's machine and then launch the .application file from there. Is there a better solution?
FWIW: Google has figured out a way to deploy their Chrome browser to Windows desktops in corporations like this one, despite the fact that ClickOnce is their deployment mechanism. If you view the source code at:
http://www.google.com/chrome/thankyou.html?&oneclickinstalled=
...you'll see they're pointing to an installer at:
/update2/installers/clickonce/GoogleInstaller_en.application.
That's a clickonce file. But somehow they've figured out a way to wrap it in an .exe in order to bypass proxy restrictions on .application files. I not familiar enough with JScript to understand what they're doing but it works. I'm trying to emulate this behavior for my own app.
This may not work for your situation. However, one possibility is to xcopy your exe and any dependencies to a folder on your webserver. Add a link in a webpage to your exe so your users can launch the app by clicking the link. In order for any of the users to be able to run the exe the first time, a caspol script needs to be run on each user machine to allow your app to run. Whenever you update the app, just xcopy the new version to the same folder on the webserver.
I have a smart client app (WinForms/WPF) currently deployed using ClickOnce.
A particular client has expressed the desire to silently deploy the app to it's intranet network users as part of its nightly/weekly client PC update service - presumably via MS Systems Management Server (SMS) and Group Policy or similar (I don't understand the exact mechanisms). As such, they've requested a .MSI installer instead.
So a few questions for confirmation (along with my thoughts on answer - am more than happy to be wrong!):
Can a ClickOnce app be silently installed en-mass by admin???
My thoughts: No, because ClickOnce is a per-user installation this would be difficult unless the user is actually logged in at time of remote installation.
Is there a tool to convert a ClickOnce app/project's settings to a simple MSI installer project (e.g. Visual Studio Deployment Project)???
My thoughts: Not in the box, but would love a tool to repeatedly copy/use settings from the ClickOnce config to the deployment project - e.g. ProductName, Version, File Associations etc. This way we only maintain one set of deployment settings.
Any other alternatives for this scenario to get 'er done quick...?
I don't think you can install a ClickOnce application silently, certainly not with SMS. And I don't know of any tool that does that, but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. ;-)
The idea of deploying a shortcut is an interesting thought. Have you ever noticed that if you leave a shortcut on the desktop even after the application is uninstalled, if the user clicks on it, it reinstalls the application?
We will be embarking on an Application developement project (.NET 3.5) for a large organization. As we started thinking about the upgrades we would be giving across the machines, we are looking at options like ClickOnce.
What we need is a push model, as long as the client machine is connected to the network, the server can send updates. I believe ClickOnce is a pull model(although by specifying minimum version we can kind of push). Also ClickOnce downloads complete files only, it cannot download the change (byte difference) among the files.
Can anyone point me to a better tool that can be used here. Also better strategies, if any, are welcome, we are in a very early stage of the project.
I don't have a definitive answer on better options, but I've used ClickOnce and can offer some advice.
There are several update options with ClickOnce (before starting, after starting, check every time, check every X Hours/Days/Weeks, etc). You can also throw those out and write code to check for updates. It's not a "push" from the server, but your client could poll for updates which would be the next best thing. Just remember, the application is going to have to restart after the update to see changes.
ClickOnce only downloads changed files. However, the progress dialog always shows the entire size of the application even if it's only downloading a single file. Everyone worries about that, but it's just a bug with the progress dialog.
Finally, I'm a big fan of keeping it simple. It's really easy to over-think these things and create a monstrosity that was never needed. We went through something similar at my company. We were so worried about users downloading unnecessary bytes, we broke our apps up into more, smaller assemblies. It turned into a nightmare; apps were harder to maintain and performed worse on the client. We finally undid it all and wasted weeks just to end up where we started.
I'm not saying you don't need the features you're asking for, I don't know your scenario. Just educate yourself first and know what you're getting yourself into.
We use clickonce at my company (about few hundred users for the app geographically dispersed). By specifying the minimum version we can make sure that every app installation gets updated after deployment automatically. You are right that clickonce downloads full files only but only files that have changed since previous version. If that is still a concern you can break your application into more smaller assemblies. I think you can also use netmodules but then Visual Studio has not built in support for that.
In general clickonce has worked good for us.
I am just in the process of implementing such a service on top of my distributed application platform. In essence I have developed a "push" model for corporates that follows these basic principles:
Software upgrades are "managed" from the server, NOT from the client, which is in line with the deployment of corporate software as opposed to user software (this is a very important point)
Software upgrades can be customised per client application on the server, i.e. the server can deploy unique configurations to every client if required
Software upgrades can be deployed to clients at different times, or all at the same time, or any combination of the two
The software upgrade version can be specified per client, i.e. different versions can be deployed to different clients as required
All software upgrades for all clients can be "managed" from a single server, i.e. the software upgrading "service" is consistent across any application, and all applications can utilise the software upgrading "service"
Clients can implement a software upgrade policy of automatic (application restarts as soon as the upgrade has been downloaded and available at the client), manual (application needs to be "sent" a custom "force upgrade"
message"), or on restart (application upgrades on shutdown if an upgrade has been downloaded and is available)
All auto-upgrading functionality is transparent to any running applications as this is all performed in autonomous background threads and all inter-process communication and file transfer is handled by my framework
In essence this now allows me (or will allow me when I have tidied a few things up and thoroughly tested the implementation) to manage the version of any application developed by me from a central server after it has been initially installed, without any client intervention.
I know this has some crossover to Serverfault.com but the advice on meta.stackoverflow was to ask it here (first) as it requires a .NET dev to answer more than likely.
I am having some problems publishing to my website a Click Once App, I am getting an error message saying (something like) IIS not running, I'm not currently at home to give an exact error message, i'll edit later if it is required to answer this question.
My ISP is lunarpages the plan I am on is this one IIS is definitely running as I have BlogEngine.NET running just fine. Anyone know what is required configuration wise (both server and client) to make this work?
The files that the ClickOnce publish create can be run on just about any web environment (include Apache/Linux.) It simply generates an html page along with the application manifest and your application files. Maybe you can deploy to a local folder and upload the files to the server?