ClickOnce Installation

Once you publish your .NET application to a target location, ClickOnce makes it easy for the user to install and update the application on a client machine. The user simply clicks a link on a Web page, clicks once again to confirm installation, and this causes the application to download and install on the client computer without the traditional install process. If your application is designed to install locally, this process creates the necessary Start Menu shortcuts and sets up the item in the Add/Remove Programs dialog box. For administrators, deploying or updating an application is simply a matter of updating files on a server; no need to individually touch every client. When the user launches the application, the XML manifest files created by Visual Studio 2005 will contain all the information to decide if the application should go to the source location and check for updates to the original application. If a newer version of the application is available, a transactional download will take place to assure the integrity of the update.

You can also choose to deploy ClickOnce applications so that they run remotely, and don't install anything locally. To help control application size constraints, ClickOnce supports HTTP compression, incremental downloading of optional components on an as-needed basis, and an update process that only downloads assemblies that have changed.

From the user’s perspective, installing your ClickOnce application is simplicity itself