WPF (ClickOnce) deployment over internet

Question

Morning, I have been trying to work out the root cause or possible a solution for a our ClickOnce deployment.

Background: We have a WPF application which can be triggered either through start up argument or without it. This application is been deployed using ClickOnce and published to one of our local server. Users within intranet can download/execute successfully and all work as expected.

What has changed: We recently had requirement to access this application from internet. To achieve this, we have created an asp.net web application and pointed to one of our sub domain. This application has a webpage with a button.

The idea is to invoke locally deployed WPF application on button click.

var url = string.Format("{0}?appId={1}", "http://serverip/wpfclient/wpf.application", Session["appreference"].ToString());
            Process.Start(url);

Issue: We have tried IE/Chrome/Mozilla/Opera to access the above mentioned website. However, none of the browsers open WPF applications. On click it does nothing. Additionally, we followed MSDN guide to ensure all recommended steps.

However, still we couldn't get this work. Is there anything else we should be following to get this work?

What we have done so far:

1. assembly is signed in using certificate
2. application/.config extensions in IIS unchecked
3. clickOnce security setting and choose Zone as Internet with full trust.

Debug result:

1. We were able to debug the asp.net server code to see whether handle is executing and it does.
2. We were able to inspect request/response using Fiddler but couldn't find anything abnormal in log

Request POST /?var=2010703 HTTP/1.1

Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml,

Referer: http://xxxxx.xxxxxx.co.uk/?var=2010703

Accept-Language: en-GB

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

Connection: Keep-Alive

Content-Length: 526

DNT: 1

Host: xxxxx.xxxxxx.co.uk

Pragma: no-cache

Cookie: ASP.NET_SessionId=qp5oszednhvasjqhws4dpoyh

Response HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Cache-Control: private

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Content-Encoding: gzip

Vary: Accept-Encoding

Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5

X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319

X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2015 07:32:40 GMT

Content-Length: 1247

Answer 1

Just to update, we have changed our internet group policy to exempt this link and doing so, we are able to launch our application. So the solution was to tune the group policy to accommodate the link.