Rich Client A / B Testing in .NET

Question

Has anyone done much A/B testing with a rich client (i.e. WinForms or WPF) application?

I am interested in deployment strategies that make sense for this scenario.

It seems like ClickOnce deployment would be a good fit, but there's so much baggage with getting ClickOnce to work properly for a non-trivial application.

If using ClickOnce, how do you push changes for 50% of the users? Is this possible, or do you just need to essentially deploy 2 separate application?

If using Windows Installer, does it make sense to push a new installer for each test scenario? This seems onerous to the end user who has to update the application each time? Is there a major downside to installing just a stub on the client PC and dynamically downloading updates when available?

Answer 1

Well, on our ASP.Net website, we have 'scenarios' that control navigation and what composite controls are used. Everything is in the deployable. Each new user session randomly picks a scenario and stores it on the session.

You could do similarly. Put your A/B scenarios in every build, and have a factory randomly pick which one is loaded and store it in a user config file or registry key.