WPF ClickOnce installs, but nothing happens

Question

Wondered if this has ever happened to anyone out there. I have a WPF application that I publish using ClickOnce.

When the ClickOnce link is reached I click "Run" and the app is installed on my machine. However, when I click the application from the start menu, it checks for updates, then does nothing.

Am I missing a setting?

Answer 1

It sounds like you the application is exiting on it's own after startup. Either by means of explicitly exiting or because of an unhanded exception.

Have you tried attaching a debugger and seeing what is happening?

Answer 2

There's a few things you do.

To check whether there is an unhandled exception you can:

1. Attach a Dispatcher Exception Handler on your System.Windows.Application object.
2. Listen to the UnhandledException event on the AppDomain.

In these you can catch any unhandled exceptions, log them and figure things out.

Another technique that we use to attach a debugger is that we have a piece of code in our initialization logic that says that if the CTRL key is pressed, a little message box pops up before anything occurs in the app with the text "starting up". This is our chance to attach a debugger and figure things out.

Answer 3

1. Put a call to System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break(); in Main()

2. run with click once from your Website, just step over the breat point when you hit it then exit your app

3. start your app from start menu

4. debug it when you break point is hit (windows will ask if you wish to debug the app)

Answer 4

There is a known problem of this happening when the user has a Kensington mouse, or at least the Kensington mouse software installed.