How to I configure click-once to install apps for all users. On another forum I got to 'use MSI' - thanks - but how. Also, the first installing user may not be admin - which may be a problem. And I want all users to trigger an update check. No local storage, it's a WPF client to a WCF service.
We're XP, internal.
ClickOnce cannot be installed the way you are thinking since to launch it, it is just a URL (http://server/myapp/myapp.application). Thus if you can get a user to click on the URL, you've accomplished the same thing. Here's what we did and it works really well.
We manage 5,000 desktops in a large enterprise and what we did to get the app on all of the machines, was create a simple MSI file that put an icon on the desktop (you could put it in the startmenu or whatever I guess). The icon has the standard app icon and is merely a link icon which points to the URL.
When a user clicks the icon, it launches the application and gets installed, thus all automatic updates come down as well.
Now this worked for us because we have really good enterprise management software to be able to deploy MSI's to the enterprise. I don't know your situation so I don't know if this will work or not.
Building an MSI of the complete app defeats the purpose of the auto updates and things ClickOnce provides. Building a MSI to drop an icon on a machine is simple and just has to be installed once.
If you need any help or have questions on this, just email me, I'm pretty easy to find, just check my blog.
Hope that helps.
-Keith
If you need to install / upgrade for all users on a PC, Clickonce is not an option. Clickonce is meant for installing an application for a single user without administrative rights.
You will need to create a MSI installer to distribute an application to multiple users on the same machine. There are multiple ways to deploy and update applications on clients when the client does not have administrative rights. A few examples:
Hope this helps.
Keith Elder has some good points. If you're delivering your app across an Enterprise and need to install updates quickly, then following his advice is probably best.
If you're distributing your apps to customers and want a more traditional "all user" install then you should use installer software (NSIS, InnoSetup, WiX, etc.) and either a 3rd party updater or build your own updater.
Let me start by saying we offer a complete updating solution which includes:
wyUpdate handles all of the Vista/Windows 7 UAC problems and all the file permission problems that inevitably pop up when you're trying to update complex software.
That being said, if you want to build your own updater here are some tips:
A good place to start is the wyUpdate C# source code I mentioned above. You can cannibalize it and use it for your own purposes. Some of the algorithms it contains:
We also have the file specifications here.
Since being automatic is a requirement let me tell you how we do it with our AutomaticUpdater control.
We use named pipes to communicate between the standalone updater (wyUpdate) and the Automatic Updater control sitting on your program's form. wyUpdate reports progress to the Automatic Updater, and the Automatic Updater can tell wyUpdate to cancel progress, to start downloading, start extracting, etc.
This keeps the updater separate from your application.
In fact, the exact named pipes C# code we use is included in an article I wrote a little while back: Multi-process C# app like Google Chrome.