如何使用通过Visual Studio 2015发布的OneClick发布.NET应用程序？

Question

I've been trying to research this the last couple of days and it doesn't seem like there is very good support for beginners. All video tutorials I find don't answer the questions I'm asking.

What I want:

I have an application I've written with .NET 4.6.1 in Visual Studio 2015 and I want to distribute an .exe that automatically checks if there are updates. It seems like this is exactly what OneClick is intended to do.

Where I'm at right now:

I want to publish to a shared drive among multiple people. It seems like I put that file path in the "Publishing Folder Location" which produces Setup.exe, MyApp.application, publish.htm, and Application Files. When you go to publish.htm there is an install button that downloads Setup.exe.

Where I'm stuck:

When you download the Setup.exe file onto your local machine and try running it gives an error. The details say it wasn't able to find the MyApp.application file. It seems that file is responsible for knowing what version of MyApp is currently installed on the users machine so that it can be compared to the download location (in my case the shared drive) to see if updates are available.

What am I missing? Do I misunderstand the purpose of OneClick publishing? Shouldn't users be able to visit the publish.htm once to get an .exe and that .exe is used to launch my application and look for updates first? I really appreciate any insight on this topic!

PS I've read over all the MSDN documentation, but it isn't user friendly to beginners in my opinion. Or maybe I'm just slow : )

Answer 1

You understand it exactly right, but when a user navigates to the html page, it downloads multiple files. The .exe, the .application and other supporting files.

You are correct in assuming ClickOnce is what you want. What I've found is the .net dependencies are very particular when using click once. You have to make sure each machine has the correct version of the framework and then they can use the htm site.

What I prefer doing is distributing the .application file to the users machine and just letting them run that. It will check for updates on the server every time it is ran and copy all the necessary decencies to the users Local directory.

Answer 2

You have to direct the users to the .application -File.

That one is responible for versioning (Updating) and executing your Application.

If you execute the .exe it will look for the .application -file to find the infos about the version, which should be installed/downloaded.

NOTE

Not all Browsers (in case of internet/intranet-deployment) support ClickOnce. But there are extensions for almost every browser