Why doesn't my ClickOnce deployment pick up the latest changes to the application?

Question

I have a WinForms app which is deployed to a local network drive (as 'Online Only') via ClickOnce.

This has been working fine but today I made some changes to the application and attempted to ClickOnce deploy it to a separate network location (to use as a test system) rather than the current production location. ClickOnce publishes successfully, with no errors, to the correct location but only publishes the pre-change version; i.e. none of my changes are visible: the version number is the old version number and the displayed release date is the last production release back in 2009.

What do I have to do to get this to publish correctly? I've used a similar approach on other applications with no such issues.

Edit: I tried changing the Assembly Name and Product Name before publishing, now I get a 'The application is missing required files' error when attempting to run the app. Lookling at the logfile it is clear that ClickOnce is using both the original production filepath (as Deployment Provider url) and the new test file path (Deployment URL). Basically it is complaining that it can't find the .application file in the original filepath which is not suprising as its not there!

I'm nervous about deploying the test application in the same folder as the production app.

Answer 1

Of course I can't check what's wrong in the environment, but try to clear the ClickOnce Cache (on the client) via;

Mage.exe -cc

Then try to start the application again.

I remember I had the same once (some time ago) and for some reason something went wrong with the cache on the client.

A more obvious cause could be that the new version is published to a different web server. But I suppose you already checked that. :)

Answer 2

Are you looking at the actual files published on the second network share to determine that the versions are wrong? Or are you deciding that by installing and running the application on the client machine?

Did you uninstall the application installed from the production URL before installing the second one, or did you change the identity of the second one so you can run them side-by-side (which you can do -- see this article here)?