Question

I have successfully developed and deployed a ClickOnce application which registers an associated file extension, for instance *.abc. When I click on a file named x.abc or if I type x.abc from the command prompt, the ClickOnce application starts, and I can retrieve the file through the dedicated API. I can also launch the application programmatically with the following code:

System.Diagnostics.Process.Start ("x.abc");

Everything works fine on my Windows Vista 64 bit box.

However, if I try to do exactly the same thing on a Windows 7 (also 64 bit ), I have a very strange problem. Here is what I observe:

1. Manual start of x.abc by double-clicking it from the Explorer works.
2. Manual start of x.abc from the command prompt works.
3. Process.Start("x.abc") does not start the application; however, the process object returned shows that there was not error and that the ClickOnce application somehow exited immediately. But even a Trace at the very beginning of the ClickOnce application is never reached.
4. Stranger yet, Process.Start("x.bat") with a file x.bat containing the single line x.abc does not start the ClickOnce application either! Same x.bat started from the Explorer works (of course).

Trying to analyse what happens with ProcMon was not very helpful, as the ClickOnce process of launching an application is very difficult to follow, from my point of view. I observe rundll32 getting to work, but no evidence of any failure.

The program which is doing the Process.Start is a full trust console application with really nothing fancy.

I can’t see what changed with respect to how ClickOnce applications are handled on Windows 7 and why Process.Start would not do exactly the same as launching the file from Explorer. It’s worth to mention that using more advanced versions of the Start method with ProcessStartInfo and setting UseShellExecute to true did not help either.

Starting cmd with Process.Start and then trying to launch x.abc shows exactly the same problem. If I compare the environment settings with a cmd started manually, I see differences in how ProgramFiles is defined (the first one points to C:\Program Files (x86) whereas the second points to C:\Program Files). The applications started from my .NET application are started on the 32-bit emulation layer (SysWoW64).

I was able to reproduce the launch failure of x.abc by starting a 32-bit version of the command prompt (that is, %windir%\SysWoW64\cmd.exe) and then typing x.abc at the prompt. I have also found an ugly workaround, which is to start a 64-bit command prompt from the 32-bit environment by launching %windir%\Sysnative\cmd.exe /C x.abc instead of x.abc.

But I’d rather use a clean way of doing it (or have a Microsoft representative tell me that this is indeed an issue with Windows 7 and/or ClickOncce and that it will be fixed soon).

Answer 1

I’ve come up with a .BAT based solution, which is easy to implement. Say that you want to launch the ClickOnce application associated with *.abc files, then you simply put a file with the same name, but with the *.bat extension in the same folder, and then execute the batch file instead. Here is the batch script:

if exist "%windir%\sysnative\cmd.exe" goto :mode64bit

rem For a file named "C:\foo\xyz.bat", this will generate the corresponding
rem "C:\foo\xyz.abc" file, built as the concatenation of the drive (%~d0),
rem the folder (%~p0) and the file name (%~n0), plus ".abc":

"%~d0%~p0%~n0.abc"
goto :end

:mode64bit

rem When running in a 32-bit emulation environment on a real 64-bit system,
rem start the 64-bit version of CMD.EXE, and make if start the ".abc" file
rem for us:

C:\Windows\sysnative\cmd.exe /c "%~d0%~p0%~n0.xgen"

:end

This could be implemented directly in the caller of the *.abc files, but sometimes a batch file helps in the transition…