Hoping there might be some in here who have experience with ClickOnce and may be able to provide some guidance? We're using Visual Studio 2008 (SP1) here.

We have a WinForm application which we deploy to the end user via a standard Visual Studio Setup Project, but we'd like to switch over to ClickOnce to take advantage of the supposed ease of deployment advantages -- it can be deployed from a central location, the application can check for and install its own updates, etc. However, we are running into a couple of issues....

If your application is already out there (installed on the client machines) and knows nothing of ClickOnce, is there a best or most appropriate way to convert over from a Setup Project based deployment to a ClickOnce deployment?

The other, and more imposing issue is that of the seeming limitation of ClickOnce in regards to a single-user and multi-user delpoyment. Reading this article (http://www.code-magazine.com/Article.aspx?quickid=0902031), it discusses this issue under point #2, along with several other limitations of ClickOnce. Additionally, I found a couple other articles that break down the differences between ClickOnce and Windows Installer: http://tinyurl.com/lo882c and http://tinyurl.com/nktb2m. It seems that if you have a single machine with multiple users, *each* user has to download and install the application, which means you can have multiple copies of the same application on one machine, and the auto update portion of ClickOnce will only update a single instance, not all.

Is there a way to have a *single* application on the machine which multiple users of the machine (aka Windows Accounts) all share, can take advantage of the ease of install and updates the ClickOnce offers, but have the versatility and control during install like the Windows Installer?

-- Andrew