Thread: Publish WinForms App to Web Site

I published a winforms application and specified an installation URL and it produces the publish.htm file.

When I open publish.htm from the installation URL with IE7, I can install the application.

But, I've noticed if the browser is IE6 or FireFox, after clicking install and the setup.exe is done running the page displays the XML and then stops.

I haven't had much luck finding more information on issues with Publishing from VS.NET and browser requirements. If anyone can point me to some relevent posts or web page I would appreciate it. I will continue to google and refine my search, I will post back if I find out something.

Thanks in advance for your help.
Pete

FFClickOne

Allows Firefox to run a .NET ClickOnce application.

MSDN Forum

Other Sites:
http://www.msdner.com/dev-archive/19/2-6-190724.shtm
http://www.west-wind.com/WebLog/posts/97100.aspx
http://www.codeprof.com/dev-archive/1/2-6-10606.shtm

Always seems to dead end.

The solutions presented on these sites have not worked for me

MSDN: Server and Client Configuration Issues in ClickOnce Deployments

This may be the cause of my problem; but, it works in IE7?

Using Third-Party Web Servers
If you are deploying a ClickOnce application from a Web server other than IIS, you may experience a problem if the server is returning the incorrect content type for key ClickOnce files, such as the deployment manifest and application manifest. To resolve this problem, see your Web server's Help documentation about how to add new content types to the server, and make sure that all the file name extension mappings listed in the following table are in place.

Update: I added the MIME types to our web host and still the same result. But, why would it work in IE7 and not IE6???

I have not tried this yet; but sounds promising:

DDay.Update

DDay.Update in a class library for adding automatic update capability to your .NET 2.0+ applications. As an alternative to ClickOnce, it uses ClickOnce manifest files, but avoids some of the do-it-all-for-you pitfalls of ClickOnce, while staying easy to use.

The technology that will be presented uses Microsoft's ClickOnce publishing mechanism that is built into Visual Studio 2005. It does not use ClickOnce itself. This is for many reasons:
1. It's difficult to use your own deployment methods (use Windows Installer, for example) and still use ClickOnce for automatic updates
2. You cannot easily update individual files with ClickOnce, it's an all-or-nothing update by default. This becomes problematic when your application is anything but very small in size, or you have very few users.
3. To use a different GUI with ClickOnce requires a complete, built-by-hand interface. DDay.Update's GUI is pluggable. There is currently a pre-built interface for Windows Forms 2.0, and one will soon be available for .NET 3.0 (WPF).
4. DDay.Update does not interfere with your application's security permissions
5. Open source applications lend to a better understanding of the underlying technology. Since DDay.Update and all its controls are open source, you are free to study and extend the code.

I have implemented a "Live" update using DDay Update. I followed the instructions, built a MSI setup package (using the setup & deployment project) and then had a couple end user's install it. Pushed out an update and the end user was notified that an update existed.