ClickOnce deployment to production

Question

Our smart-client application is deployed using the ClickOnce. Our production site is hosted on 2 separate web servers, and they are pointed from the same domain-name (for load-balancing). Here is what we do when we push updates to the production.

1. In VS, publish the smart-client application into a localhost directory
2. Copy/Paste the directory to the webservers

The deployment address from VS is localhost while it is being used in some other production website. Is that a proper way to deploy smart-client applications?

Answer 1

Does that actually work?

It seems to me that making a ClickOnce deployment available using http://localhost/ as the domain in the deployment provider URL would be a security risk. Couldn't anybody just copy that deployment to anywhere and serve it up?

Also, wouldn't it look on the user's localhost (assuming he had IIS installed) when he tried to install the application?

Why wouldn't you set the installation URL to the address of the load balancer that would in turn correspond to one of the two deployment folders?

And does it work to use the load balancer? You can't redirect a ClickOnce application -- it has to have a straight shot from the client machine to the deployment -- so I'd be interested to know if it works through a load balancer.

RobinDotNet