I have a .NET Winforms app (created in VS2005) that I deploy using ClickOnce. On one of the forms I have a Crystal Reports viewer control for the user to view the reports, but in order to use that in the app I have to include the the Crystal Reports XI Release 2 prereq which they install prior to installing the app. This basically installs a watered down version of Crystal onto the users machine.
It works publishing this way, but it is sort of a hassle for the user to have to wait on Crystal to install and is a huge hassle for me because publishing the app with the prereq takes a long time to finish because it has to upload the large prereq up to the server.
Since the publish takes so long and new installs are not super common I generally don't include the prereq when I publish changes and instead only publish it with the prereq if a new install is needed.
If you've used ClickOnce to publish an app with Crystal Reports, is this how you've published it or is there an easier/better way.
Is there a way to include/GAC the CR dll's needed instead of including and installing the Crystal Report prereq or is there a way that I can configure the OneClick deployment to not have to copy the file up every time. If I could configure the ClickOnce deployment so that I don't have to include the prereq and instead just point the install to a standard location that would help.
Hope this was somewhat clear and that someone can help out. Thanks
When you deploy a ClickOnce app with prerequisites you can specify where the prerequisites are downloaded from, local or the vendor (such as Microsoft). If you specify the vendor it will not include the prerequisite binaries in your deployment package.
If Crystal has not specified a remote location then you can always do your own prerequisite using the Bootstrapper Manifest Generator. You would then upload the Crystal binaries to a location on your deployment server, create your custom prerequisite using your new binary repository as the vendor site, add the custom prerequisite in your clickonce application and set it to download from the vendors site.
I believe that in VS 2010 you have a third option for ClickOnce prerequisites where you can target a specific site removing the need for your custom prerequisite.
From the responses, it seems that this is pretty common so I'll just post what I do to get around the issue for now.
First I'll start that I think Bronumski's response should work, but I've not had success with it in the past when I tried it.
The way that I get around this issue is just to publish the files using ClickOnce to a folder locally and then ftp the files over manually excluding the crystalreport install directory that is created.
I know this is not a good answer for this, but I don't have to deploy very often anymore and so this is my work around to the issue for now. Please read through all of the other answers to find one that might help resolve your issue.
Hope it helps. Thanks
The Crystal 11.5 Merge Modules for .Net are buggered, and that introduces issues when deploying through ClickOnce.
We eventually ditched ClickOnce and went for a self-extractor setup (Nullsoft Install System), and installed the Crystal Redist once-off on the client PC's.
Crystal is a nightmare, you can never 'get it right', but you can mitigate the headaches.
Conceptually, you're doing it the same I did awhile ago. The one thing I did differently was to deploy it from the build server instead of my machine. Quite frankly, I didn't care how long it took to deploy just so long as it didn't interrupt my machine.
I was using CruiseControl.Net for the builds so when it came time to deploy the release build I would just disable the CC build for it, start the publishing process, and check it after awhile.
When I had this problem, I created a seperate installer for Crystal Reports That made sense for me because I had many programs that used it.
That shortened the click once deployments but systems without the prequisite would crash with an exception, so when I migrated everything to Visual Studio 2008 and the newer Crystal Reports I started including them instead.
It takes longer each time they install and update, but in my case it isn't worth the trouble of managing the prequisite versus the ease of deploying.
Sorry to have to admit that I had a similar problem and ended up coming up with similarly arbitrary solution.
I ended up sitting between two stools, if the user didn't want Crystal on their machine, I offered an option to access a webservice hosted on a server with Crystal, so the job could be done remotely. If they had Crystal, the the job was done locally.
It wasn't perfect, but it least it was reasonably reactive.
Related
I've gone down a rabbit hole and finding it hard to know where to go now.
I have a report project I'm trying to script up for deployment to a SharePoint site on a highly controlled production server. On my Dev box I can just deploy my project from BIDS and the reports run. If I upload my rdls, datasets and datasource to the document library directly they don't. I've done some digging and found that the uploaded files aren't linked in any way and that BIDS does some extra steps to set the DataSource for the Shared Datasets and then sets the reference to these DataSets on the Rdls.
So I've been poking around and can see that I need to call the SetItemReferences on ReportingServices2010.asmx to define the links but I'm lost using Powershell. Some scripts I've found are focussed on setting DataSources so I'm trying to adapt that using bits from other scripts but getting lost. One example does $Reference = New-Object -TypeName SSRS.ReportingService2010.ItemReference but I don't know where they're getting the SSRS. namespace from.
Incidentally, the structure I have is:
- One Shared DataSource points to a SharePoint List
- One DataSet pointing to the shared DataSource
- Four reports with NO embedded DataSources and five embedded DataSet references each pointing to the shared DataSet applying various filters.
Is there already a built in way to do this so I can avoid hassles?
Requirements here are that I need something extremely simple that doesn't require extra PowerShell modules to be installed (if possible). The network is highly controlled and it's difficult enough to get scripts we run ourselves approed let alone some third party module installed on the farm of machines in Prod. Basically it will take at least six months to scan, test and formally approve any addons but if we write a very simple script it's much easier.
Yes - deploy with your browser. I have written 3 separate report projects with SSRS on a highly controlled SharePoint 2010 production environment. Each one of them, I have deployed using the browser.
Deploying using your browser is simpler than the PowerShell. Follow the general steps outlined in the last part of this thread. Doing it via Powershell is possible, but far more difficult task.
If the admins have this production environment so highly controlled, then there should exist a parallel staging environment that is kept in precise configuration as production and available to you in order to do DevOps of your SSRS reports. You should request to test your install on the staging environment in order to work out your deployment issues (either by browser or PowerShell). If you get denied this request, then you need to request again. Otherwise its impossible to get it perfect if you don't have access to develop on a similar system.
DevOps on these reports is the last mile of the race and can be difficult if you are the first to do it at your organization. You can do it, just keep going and your reports will be installed. Keep good notes so when you development future reports you can repeat this process and will be the go-to person for getting it done in the future. Don't lose faith.
In setting up Sitecore 7.2 at my organization for our public facing .com I have run into a hiccup while trying to implement proper CI, Release Management, and Deployment Management. I am able to, using MSBuild, compile my Sitecore MVC code, compile .update packages from TDS, and package each of these in .nupkg files for Octopus Deploy. What I am running in to is that once I have deployed the MVC code I must also deploy the Sitecore Structure/Content which requires me to install .update packages. I have tried the solution provided at https://github.com/adoprog/Sitecore-Deployment-Helpers but for a fairly lightweight site this is timing out around 20 minutes within Octopus Deploy for only my System package, let alone having not touched Structure or Content. I am looking for a way, preferably through PowerShell (not strictly speaking, the Sitecore PowerShell Extensions built into the sitecore web interface after installing that package). Using the SPE would be acceptable if, and only if, I can use SPE's Cmdlets from Octopus Deploy's PowerShell workflow.
Please Advise.
Jason Bert has a great series of blogs on using Octopus Deploy with TeamCity and TDS for deploying to Sitecore instances:
http://www.jasonbert.com/2013/11/03/continuous-integration-deployment-with-sitecore/
You can also use TDS itself to deploy the items in the solution, but this uses direct calls to a webservice on the target Sitecore instance which may not meet with your requirements.
Also, are you deploying the entire System tree? 20 minutes to deploy changes made to the System tree seems unusual, unless you've made a LOT of changes in there (for example, the Dictionary). Even then, you shouldn't be source-controlling author content, only the elements crucial to the solution that are owned by development.
You can install the update package via sitecore utility at /sitecore/admin/UpdateInstallationWizard.aspx
If you experience that installing the package via this mode takes a lot of time, you might want to modify the Deployment Property Manager settings for the TDS project.
You can do this by right clicking your TDS project in Visual Studio and selecting "Deployment Property Manager".
Once the Deployment Property Manager window opens up, set the Deploy property to Once for every node which does not need to be updated. For any items which are to be updated, mark them as Always.
This will drastically save you on the time required to install the package.
I'm developing a WPF application that I deploy with ClickOnce to a network share on the intranet from which clients can install it.
I need to make sure that the user can't modify any of the application files (especially DLLs and the main executable) on their machine. That is, if any of the application files have changed, the application should refuse to run. I was under the impression that, when using ClickOnce, this was available out of the box and that the application would refuse to start if the file hashes didn't match the manifest.
However, I tried to manually replace the executable or a DLL with a slightly different version after installation and the application still ran fine (executing the modified code).
Does ClickOnce provide what I'm looking for?
How can I enable the functionality?
I'm using a level 2 StartSSL code-signing certificate to sign the application manifest if this matters.
P.S.: just to be sure: I'm talking about the installed application files, not the installation files.
You can sign AND strong name each one of DLLs to prevent tampering but then, doing so has its own pain points when it comes to upgrades and distribution in general. Note that even doing so, doesn't entirely prevent someone from injecting code into your running process. It's a sticky subject.
I recommend going thru this question which already discusses these points in detail. Does code-signing without strong-naming leave your app open to abuse?
I think it will be a fairly manual process.
Doesn't look like the VS2013 deployment tools handle code obfuscation but they do support signing and app permissions. Start with that, then you might have to get the generated manifest as a starting point to build your own with obfuscated assemblies.
MS docs break it into 3 steps: 1. obfuscate, 2. build manifest, 3. manually publish
Here is what MS docs say...
Securing ClickOnce Applications
Deploying Obfuscated Assemblies
You might want to obfuscate your application by using Dotfuscator to prevent others from reverse engineering the code. However, assembly obfuscation is not integrated into the Visual Studio IDE or the ClickOnce deployment process. Therefore, you will have to perform the obfuscation outside of the deployment process, perhaps using a post-build step. After you build the project, you would perform the following steps manually, outside of Visual Studio:
Perform the obfuscation by using Dotfuscator.
Use Mage.exe or MageUI.exe to generate the ClickOnce manifests and sign them. For more information, see Mage.exe (Manifest Generation and Editing Tool) and MageUI.exe (Manifest Generation and Editing Tool, Graphical Client).
Manually publish (copy) the files to your deployment source location (Web server, UNC share, or CD-ROM).
This is a project I've been working on off and on for months and I feel like I'm pretty close, but I just can't seem to get past the final hurdle.
The goal is to develop an organization extension library that contains both internal and 3rd party code that we frequently rely on.
History
As a test project, I started with Apache Poi because that is already in wide use in our environment. I have a plug-in and feature built just from the Poi .jars that allows me to build our current Poi applications as long as I add the plug-in (from my workspace) to my build path. The apps work on the servers because we have already distributed the Poi .jars by manually copying them.
The next step is taking that plug-in and getting it into an updatesite so that all of the servers and developers can synchronize on one version. I found and followed these two excellent blog articles (that I wish existed when I started this project):
http://www.dalsgaard-data.eu/blog/wrap-an-existing-jar-file-into-a-plug-in/
http://www.dalsgaard-data.eu/blog/deploy-an-eclipse-update-site-to-ibm-domino-and-ibm-domino-designer/
With the caveat that the articles are written for Domino 9 and we are running 8.5.3 here, but that only matters in the last (installation) step.
Current
This brings us to the problem. All of the above seems to have worked great up to a point. I can install my feature to my designer client from the eclipse update site and it works great. However, the install is failing when I import that into our updatesite.nsf database. This means that while the developers can all install from the updatesite if I put it on a network drive, that doesn't deploy updates to our servers.
The problem is that when I try to install from the .nsf update site, the Eclipse Updater just hangs. I've let it go for well over an hour and eventually Notes becomes completely unresponsive.
So the question is, is there anything I might have done wrong, either in the development of the plug-in or server configuration that might be causing this issue?
Additional Info
I'm looking at the osgi console and that is largely unhelpful. I am getting the following errors as I'm trying to install: SEVERE Could not access digest on the site: no protocol: 0/5B004DDD5E38F3FF85257CAF004C72C7/$file/digest.zip ::class.method=unknown ::thread=Worker-7 ::loggername=org.eclipse.update.core
I could generate dumps if that would be useful.
Security is also locked down fairly tight here. It could be a security issue - is there a way to troubleshoot that? Once I get to the hang I'm just stuck guessing.
This has been edited for clarity and to update information
I know that this is post is over 5 years ago but...
for those that find this and are trying to resolve the error
SEVERE Could not access digest on the site: no protocol: "
is due to the update site project not having the URL of the Domino updatesite.nsf not being added to the Archives tab of the site.xml.
I found the updatesite.nsf also needs to be anonymously accessible as no credentials are prompted/passed through to the Domino server hosting the updatesite.nsf database (at least from DDE), YMMV from eclipse. So if Anonymous connections are blocked on the Domino server you will be out of luck.
To develop a plug-in you really want to have 3 projects:
the plug-in
the feature
the update site
Of course a feature can contain more than one plug-in (and probably should) and a update site can contain more than one feature (and probably should). Once you have an update site project it features a handy button "build all" that makes sure plug-in, feature and update-site get compiled in one go. And that button is what you really want.
You can point using a setting in your Domino Designer (or local Domino server) to the feature directory. Add a plain text .link file to framework/rcp/eclipse/links, that contains the path to your install site - it then picks up the features and plug-ins from there. After a build you would need to restart designer/server to activate the updated feature.
For the Domino server the approach using an updatesite.nsf and the respective notes.ini setting makes the most sense (to me). http restart required. Lazy people script the whole thing.
I still don't have a great answer for this, but I believe the issue is related to the environment here. I don't have the authority to change the environment, even if I were able to conclusively demonstrate it is the cause of this problem, so it is a moot point. All I can say is that at least one administrator computer had no issue installing from the update site.
For me, the solution for distributing the update site is to put it on a network drive and have everyone install it from there. The server has no problem using it from the updatesite.nsf.
i have requirement. i have created the window application and i have created the setup of that application that has been installed to client machine.
Now the requirement is that if i will do the further modification to the project the client not need to install whole application again instead client only need to install Update of new version. like using Patches or something. How can i do this is there and tool in VS from which we can create the update patches or something.
Please Help..
There are several options, but they depend on which installer you used in the first place.
It is very easy with Inno Setup, as (if the file items are configured correctly) InnoSetup will detect that the application is already installed and only copy modified files, even though you publish the entire setup. This will be automatic.
If you used the built-in Visual Studio setup project, it is also possible, but you must set a different "upgrade id" in the setup properties. I haven't worked much with this, yet.
A third option is using Windows Installer XML (WIX), which is able to generate patch installers, but I haven't worked much with WIX yet.
One last option would be to write something yourself that is able to exchange old files against new files, but you'd have to keep UAC in mind for newer Windows versions.
I have solved the problem...using ClickOne Setup of VS. i publish the win form to a specific URl and each time when application launchs its check the Upgraded version if available it install and run.
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/041229.htm