Using ClickOnce to publish existing exe with developed dlls

Question

I have an win-forms application that takes an existing exe which we do not have the source code for. We do, however, develop several Dlls that plug-in to the application to provide the core back-end functionality.

I'd like to be able to configure ClickOnce to deploy this app, but I'm not sure if this is possible given that the main exe isn't built from source code.

One possibility would be to develop a simple wrapper exe that calls the main exe, but I don't care for that solution; it seems like a bit of a hack.

Are there any alternatives?

Answer 1

Couldn't you just reference the exe in your project? That would cause it to be copied to the bin folder along with your dlls at compile time. ClickOnce grabs everything in the bin folder, so you should be OK.

Answer 2

Assuming the main exe is a .Net application, then yes, you should be able to deploy with ClickOnce. I'm guessing your actual problem has more to do with creating the deployment.

I would recommend using MageUI to manually create a deployment rather than Visual Studio. Once you get the app deployed and working you can work on streamlining your deployment creation process.