Question

When using Clickonce deployment when the publishing wizard in Visual Studio asks if the application will look for updates online (and if so, to provide a url) what exactly should I point to? Do I simply host the contents of the /publish folder on a server, and enter the url to that folder? Then just update the online /publish folder when I release updates, or should the url point to something else?

Answer 1

Normally the best way to host a ClickOnce Deployment is to deploy from a webserver.

On the first page in the Publish Wizard where it asks Specify the location to publish the application leave this as Publish\

On the second page where it asks 3 options select the top one marked From a Website and type in the url of the web server where you want to deploy from (this needs to be the full uri inc virtual directory).

Then complete the wizard.

What you should end up with is a series of files in the Publish directory, one of which will be publish.htm

You can then upload these files as is to your webserver and give out the link to the publish.htm file to let your users start the installer.

If you re-publish just keep the settings the same and you should roll out a new update to all those people who used the publish.htm link to install.