clickonce, applications settings, editing after publish

Question

Hi

After publishing from visual studio, how does one go about editing the published applications settings? Can you hand edit the .deploy file?

Regards, Fredrik

Answer 1

Hi Fredrik,

Are you trying to modify the publishing settings, or the files included in the deployment? Although the files look like plain XML, they are digitally signed, and should not be modified in a regular editor.

You can use the MageUI tool to modify the deployment and application manifests. You can access this from the Visual Studio Command Prompt or one of the following locations:

VS2010: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin
VS2008: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin

This tool will let you modify the properties of the deployment. There are two manifests. The application manifest (yourapp.exe.manifest) is under the versioned folder of the deployment, and includes the list of files that are going to be included in the deployment. If you want to add or remove files from the deployment, you need to modify this manifest.

The second manifest is the deployment manifest (yourapp.application). This has the properties like the deployment provider URL and the pointer to the application manifest to be used to get the list of files.

When you change either of these manifests, you must save and re-sign them.

If you change the application manifest, you then need to open the deployment manifest (yourapp.application) and re-set the path to the application manifest (it's a relative path, and though it may SAY it's right, you still need to re-set it by browsing to it) and save and re-sign the deployment manifest.

If you just make changes to the deployment manifest, you don't need to change the application manifest as well. But be sure to sign it with the same PFX File you used to sign the original deployment. Both manifests MUST be signed with the same PFX file.

Hope this helps!