Question

When deploying a ClickOnce application, the installation folder URL, is there a way to make it relative to the web application directory hosting it?

For instance, for local testing I publish to http://localhost:54592. However, when this web application is deployed, it could be anything from http://www.foo.com to http://www.foo.com/MyVirtualDirectory

I would like the path to find the installer in its current location, and the application after installer has completed to reference the web app host, not the development URL.

Platform: Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0, and C#.

Answer 1

This works out of the box if you stick with *.application as your application source. You just need to pick a folder inside your web application to publish your ClickOnce application, and the application is available from this address under your application.

For example, if copy your site to C:\inetpub\wwwroot\mysite and copy the ClickOnce to C:\inetpub\wwwroot\mysite\myapp with MyClickOnce.application inside the ClickOnce folder.

Then you expose your website as http://example.com and the ClickOnce application is available under http://example.com/myapp/MyClickOnce.application.

In case of setup.exe you need to recreate the manifest after you publish it to the destination location. This is done with mage.exe.