Does ClickOnce support deployment of applications to clients behind a Proxy that requires authentication?

Question

With all the advantages of ClickOnce, we would like to use it as the deployment mechanism for our App.

However i have found this message in Microsoft Connect where it says that ClickOnce fails with proxy authentication.

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=115468&wa=wsignin1.0

So does that mean that one of the most common scenarios (Windows server + ISA Server) in companies doesnt work with ClickOnce??

The "solution" is to modify machine.config for every client!. That is absolutely unnaceptable for us (Besides, what would be the purpose of ClickOnce??)

Our application uses 3.5 and i would like to know if that problems still exists. Or if someone has managed to make this work.

(I know that there is a patch for v2 but what about v3> ?)

Thanks

Answer 1

My answer may be a bit off-topic, but I think you shouldn't concern about this :

• Individual users and small corporations don't have proxy with authentication

• Big corporations do have dedicated IT people to solve this kind of things. They will either find a way to get ClickOnce to work (including deploying a local machine.conf on every client), or turn your whole application down because using ClickOnce is against their policy (IT security departments don't like the idea of having executable code automatically updated over the internet into their safe network, I know that first hand)

Answer 2

Doesn't answer your exact question regarding if the issue is still existant in 3.5, as I'm still on a 2.0 codebase. However I hope the following is of use to you, depending on what available options in the deployment environment is:

So does that mean that one of the most common scenarios (Windows server + ISA Server) in companies doesnt work with ClickOnce??

UNC deployment is the workaround that I have used several times when encountering this proxy authentication issue when deploying a ClickOnce (in 2.0) app. In a corporate environment, the NTFS permissions on the share can provide the required level of security

Answer 3

For customers with the .NET framework 2.0, Microsoft has a hot-fix for this issue which can be found here.

Note that this issue is affected by the version of .NET that your customers are running (not the version that you're running). If your clients need to have .NET 3.5 to install/run your ClickOnce app, that version has already fixed this issue.

Answer 4

If you can get the initial install onto the clients machine (CD or internal install point) then I have a workaround on my blog.

http://bronumski.blogspot.com/2009/06/clickonce-updates-via-authentication.html