Question

I have a command line executable I built which is published on the network via ClickOnce. The main use of this tool is through Visual Studio as an external tool. When I set this up in Visual Studio I am able to set the command path to the shortcut under roaming data for my profile.

However, Visual Studio resolves this to a path such as:
C:\Users\ME\AppData\Local\Apps\2.0\CGR50YPV.W5E\RXBXM176.HH8\crea..tion_f423fce0316e1dfa_0001.0000_adecafbe6c6acba3\MyAppp.exe

So what happens is if I launch the exe and grab a new version, Visual Studio is still pointing at the old version (as indicated above). I can fix this by re-pointing the command value of my external tool to the shortcut of my exe, but this is a bit frustrating to deal with.

How can I make this work without having to update my command path every time?

Answer 1

You shouldn’t access a ClickOnce application via the exe file. If you’re going to do that, just xcopy the \bin folder of the application to the other machine. If you want to use the update features, you should always invoke the ClickOnce application by using the shortcut or by invoking the link to the deployment manifest on the webserver. (The deployment manifest is the application file). You can do a process.start on that link.

[edit — add new info]
Ohhhhh, so you’re accessing the shortcut in the folder under the user’s profile? Am I getting that? Instead of looking for that one, can you point to the shortcut on the start menu? It will add one automatically when the user installs the application, if the application is online/offline. The shortcut is added to the start menu to the location of the Publishing Company / Product Name using those fields from the Options dialog.

I do this by setting the assembly information to the same values, and retrieving the assembly information programmatically. I always set the assembly description to be identical to the product name, and the assembly company to be the same as the publishing company. Then I can do this:

Assembly code = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
string company = string.Empty;
string description = string.Empty;
if (Attribute.IsDefined(code, typeof(AssemblyCompanyAttribute)))
{
        AssemblyCompanyAttribute ascompany =
          (AssemblyCompanyAttribute)Attribute.GetCustomAttribute(code, 
       typeof(AssemblyCompanyAttribute));
    company = ascompany.Company;
}
if (Attribute.IsDefined(code, typeof(AssemblyDescriptionAttribute)))
{
    AssemblyDescriptionAttribute asdescription =
    (AssemblyDescriptionAttribute)Attribute.GetCustomAttribute(code, 
    typeof(AssemblyDescriptionAttribute));
    description = asdescription.Description;
}
if (company != string.Empty && description != string.Empty)
{
    string shortcutName = 
      string.Concat(Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Programs),
        \", company, "\\", description, ".appref-ms");
}

(Sorry, I can’t figure out how to make the code format prettier and show the indents properly, but you get the idea.)