Remove ClickOnce from a WinForms app

Question

I have a WinForms application that was going to use ClickOnce. But it turns out ClickOnce won't work for my application, so I'd like to remove it. Only...there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to do this. There's no "Un-ClickOnce" button. Does anybody know what steps I need to take to get my app to be like it was before ClickOnce integrated itself?

(I know I can create a new project and import stuff into it, but it seems silly to have to do that, so I'm hoping there's another way.)

Answer 1

I believe the only thing that is left from clickonce once you stop deploting it is a publish.xml that tells you about what you have deployed thus far and what version you are at. Otherwise there is really nothing there that need concern you, just deploy fom the bin folders as you would without clickonce

Answer 2

I agree with the others, there is no need to "remove ClickOnce".

If you are really going for it though, IIRC all ClickOnce settings are in the .csproj file for the project, so remove all XML tags there that relate to ClickOnce. (maybe easiest to compare to a new app that hasn't been deployed with CO ever to see what tags are not there)

Answer 3

Just don't publish it using ClickOnce. ClickOnce isn't really embedded in your application, for example you can just as well deploy an application using ClickOnce if you only have the built assemblies using mage.exe. So just don't use ClickOnce to deploy.

Answer 4

If you refer the the ClickOnce Application Deployment Manifest files that appear in your Debug folder, go to Project Properties -> Security and uncheck 'Enable ClickOnce Security Settings'

You can also go to Project Properties -> Signing and uncheck 'Sign the ClickOnce manifests', but this is not necessary because it does not have what to sign if you do the first uncheck.

Now if you go to debug and delete .application files, at rebuild, there will not appear again.