Are the 60 projects in the same solution as the main project? Are they referenced by the main project? In the references, is the property "copy local" set to true?

As for the 3rd party dll's, I recommend one of two things.

(a) Deploy them locally with the application. This means you add the dll's to the main project, set build action to "content" and "copy to output directory" as "copy always". They will be included in the deployment. This won't work if the dll's HAVE TO be installed in the GAC. You'd be surprised how often it DOES work though.

(b) Create an install package (setup & deployment package) to deploy the 3rd party dll's, then add it to the prerequisites list using the Bootstrapper Manifest Generator.

If you really don't want to install them, you pretty much have to create a setup & deployment package that checks for them, and if they're not there, it fails the installation.

RobinDotNet

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Click here to visit my ClickOnce blog!

Are the 60 projects in the same solution as the main project? Are they referenced by the main project? In the references, is the property "copy local" set to true?

As for the 3rd party dll's, I recommend one of two things.

(a) Deploy them locally with the application. This means you add the dll's to the main project, set build action to "content" and "copy to output directory" as "copy always". They will be included in the deployment. This won't work if the dll's HAVE TO be installed in the GAC. You'd be surprised how often it DOES work though.

(b) Create an install package (setup & deployment package) to deploy the 3rd party dll's, then add it to the prerequisites list using the Bootstrapper Manifest Generator.

If you really don't want to install them, you pretty much have to create a setup & deployment package that checks for them, and if they're not there, it fails the installation.

RobinDotNet

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Click here to visit my ClickOnce blog!

Give me some idea of the structure. Are all of the 60 projects in separate solutions? Are talking 60 solution files?

You can do one of two things.
(1) Add the dll's locally.
(2) Link to the dll in the \bin\release folder of the projects outside your main project.

I recommend (1), so you can control when they get updated in your main project.

I'm assuming that your main project has references to the dll's under the References. In that case, here's what I would do:

Add a folder to your project, call it something like referenced_dlls.
Copy the dll's from the projects into the referenced_dlls folder.
Delete the references to those projects, and re-add them, pointing at the dll's in the referenced_dlls folder. In the properties, set "copy local" to true.

If they aren't referenced directly in your main project, but you want to include them, you need to handle this a little differently, so let me know if that's the case and I'll provide more information.

One other thing -- if you strongly name those dll's, then ClickOnce will only copy them down if the version changes, which will make updates faster.

RobinDotNet

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Click here to visit my ClickOnce blog!