Is your application deployed "online" or "online and offline" ? I assume you are deploying it to the server; is it a web server? Is your installation URL a http: address?

If it is deployed as "online only', then when the user installs it, it will provide the desktop shortcut for you.

If you are deploying it as "online/offline", you can create your own shortcut by clicking the box in the deployment properties. You can also do it programmatically, but why, if you are using .Net 3.5, although this may be an SP-1 fearure.

http://robindotnet.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/creating-a-desktop-shortcut-for-a-click-once-application/

You don't want to create a shortcut to the exe file because (a) it won't run it as a ClickOnce application, and (b) the location changes every time there's an update.

I'm not sure why you need to create a desktop shortcut when ClickOnce will do it for you.

RobinDotNet

Thanks for the response!

It's deployed as "online and offline." It is being deployed to a fileshare on our application server.

The reason I wanted to create my own shortcut is because I do not want the exe in each individual's profile. Our users change machines quite often (I know it sounds strange, but management has a real good reason for doing this). Since they are constantly changing machines, they would have to constantly loadall ClickOnceprograms each time they change workstations.

Ineed ashortcut that shows up on the desktop of All Users. That's what I used to do with VB6 apps.

The file structure for a test app I ran is as follows:

Demo ClickOnce
Application Files
Demo ClickOnce
Demo ClickOnce.application**
Shortcut to Demo ClickOnce.application*
Demo ClickOnce.sln
Demo ClickOnce.suo
publish.htm
setup.exe

Demo ClickOnce_1_0_0_0,Demo ClickOnce_1_0_0_1,Demo ClickOnce_1_0_0_2,Demo ClickOnce_1_0_0_3, etc. are in the Application Files folder.

The shortcut I created, Shortcut to Demo ClickOnce.application*, which I put in All Users/Desktop on a test machine, points toDemo ClickOnce.application**. It does update on the test machine when I publish a new version on my developer machine.

My questions are:
1. Where exactly is the app running from?
2. If I put this shortcut on 300 user machines, would they all be running the application from the server and is that a viable solution? All users will have the application opened and be working in it all day.

Thanks, Robin.

I was really looking for a better way than to install using an MSI because of update issues. The people who requested the application ALWAYS ask for additions to programs.

The network people can push out an update for me, but I have little control over it; in other words, it would be pushed out at some hour like 3:00 a.m. and I wouldn't be able to test it before the next day.

. . . . . "With VB6 apps, I always just deployed apps with a shortcut to the .exe that I placed a copy of on user desktops. I could then just update the .exe file with any changes and all shortcuts would point to the changed version." . . . (from my previous post) - That's how we always did it in the past. I know it wouldn't work for 10,000 users, but can you give me some ballpark figure of how many users would have a substantial impact the server?

Server info:

Intel(R)Xeon(R)CPU
5130 @ 2.00GHz
2.00 GHz, 1.99 GB of RAM

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2
Standard Edition, SP1




Shannon