In the real world deployment to clients directly from a development
environment is not exactly the normal or advised way to go. Yet ClickOnce
deployment, neat as it is, seems to assume that you deploy straight from
development to a production environment. In most applications I work on we take
a more sane approach and development deploys to a test/acceptance environment.
Only after tests have concluded is the software released to the live production
environment.
Yet in the case of ClickOnce you need to specify the install location in
Visual Studio 2005, hardly the tool to move an assembly from test/acceptance
into a production environment.
Fortunately there is a tool for the job and it is Mage, or MageUi depending
on your preferences and needs. Mage is the command line utility to use when
updating or creating a manifest, use this to automate the deployment of
ClickOnce applications. To get started MageUi is the more interesting of the
two.
Lets take a quick look
- Make sure you have a ClickOnce deployment.
- Open the .Net framework SDK command prompt.
- Start MageUi. Starting Mage without any parameters also MageUi.
- Now open the deployment manifest. This is the ".application" file in the
root of the deployment folder.
- Select Deployment Options.
- Now you see the URL used to start the application. Here you can change
it from a test/acceptance location to the actual deployment location.
Besides updating the URL you can also update other aspects of the deployment
like update behavior and main application.
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