ClickOnce in .NET is a technology that allows you to marry the rich user experience of Windows Forms applications with the deployment and update advantages of Web applications. What do you do, however, when you want to deploy different application configurations to different sets of users? For example, you might have a Power User version of the application to be distributed to a set of users who require advanced features and a normal version of the application to be distributed to a set of users who only require basic features. you will learn two different methods for distributing different application configurations to users.
Method 1: Installing and Updating from Different Locations
The first method for deploying different configurations via ClickOnce is to set up separate installations for each configuration of the application and pointing all versions of the application to one, common update location. This method can cause quite a bit of maintenance overhead because you have to maintain a different installation for each configuration that you have. However, once you set up the installations, you can streamline the process of deploying updates because all of the applications (regardless of the original installation location) will update from the same place while maintaining the initial configurations.
To follow the demonstration below, you will need to set up the following:
- Create the folder "C:\Temp\ClickOncePublishFolder"
- Create the folder "C:\ClickOnceInstallationPath"
- Create the folder "C:\ClickOnceUpdatePath"
- Configure "ClickOnceInstallationPath" to be a shared folder with the same name
- Configure "ClickOnceUpdatePath" with IIS to be a virtual directory with the same name
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