Hey guys,
We are thinking about the deployment and update strategy for a fairly large framework throughout our organization. The application will be in .NET 3.5 and will run on Windows XP, Vista and Win 7 machines. I have used Clickonce few times and it works well for sure. Has anyone thought of, or have implemented the BITS feature of Windows with Clickonce. I feel the trickle upgrade approach of BITS would make the frequent framework updates pretty user friendly.
Any help appreciated.
The thing is that BITS is used to transfer data in the background, while CLICKONCE is more-or-less a JIT downloader of those DLLs/executables needed to install/update/run an application.
Additionally, ClickOnce is an out-of-box experience. It already works, whereas a BITS solution (even one using the old Updater Application Block) requires you to roll out a framework for updating the application.
Also note that there's nothing saying that a BITS solution would be a "trickle" approach. One could have it download the file in one batch, on high-priority and basically emulate the functionality of ClickOnce, or one could build it to download updates in the background similiar to how FireFox performs updates.
Finally, be aware that ClickOnce does have security ramifications in what the ClickOnce deployed application is allowed to do by default, or even what resources it is allowed to communicate with by default. Read more here.
I doubt that Clickonce would be of much help, because it's unlikely that you could extend it to use BITS. Maybe a combined approach would work where you initially deploy a small custom downloader via Clickonce which uses BITS to get the remaining parts and does all future updates.