I have inherited a project that uses clickonce deployment. It has a number of configuration settings specific to the environment such as web service url, database connection strings etc. I have four environments that i need to deploy the application to.

It seems that i have to update the project with these configuration settings, then publish, for each environment and i have four environment specific deployments. This is becoming difficult and time consuming to manage. Is there a mechanism that allows me to manage the situation. Is is possible to have a single deployment that uses a set of environment specific setting located in each environment.

How do others manage this situation?

regards

Paul

Hi Paul,

Based on my understanding, these four environments have different web service URL settings, database connection settings etc. But you don’t want your user to make these configurations after install the app. You want to pre-set them. Am I misunderstanding you?

If my understanding is correct. I think you will have at least four URLs to hold these deployments. My suggestion is you can make four copies of your solution; set the configuration information in the VS for each of them and publish. That will be easier than use mage.exe to manually deployment your ClickOnce application. Therefore different business purpose users can install the application from different URLs. They don’t need to configure any more.

If I misunderstood you, please feel free to tell me.

Sincerely,
Kira Qian
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Doh! I missed the note about the different settings. I thought he just wanted to deploy it from four different places. Kira is right, it will be easier to use Visual Studio than Mage.

RobinDotNet

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Microsoft MVP, Client App Dev

Hi

I would be a happy if i could store the settings somewhere on each platform. The issue is that the settings are in the solution / project files which means that i keep having to change the settings, publish, then repeat for each environment - time consumming. Ideally i would like the settings to be on the application server where the application is launched from, but the original developer tells me that this can't be done. It would be nice to have a single deployment package that i can install on each target platform.

Paul

You mentioned the connection string and web service urls. Are these in a configuration file, or can you put them in a configuration file and just include a different file with each deployment? Exactly what settings are different for each deployment? By target, do you mean .NET version or CPU or what?

RobinDotNet

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Microsoft MVP, Client App Dev

Hi Paul,

As you have already known, ClickOnce doesn’t support to keep some configuration files on the server and let users to download them along with the ClickOnce app.

Another thought is you can put all these settings information in a single configuration file. So you just need to publish one copy. When your users want to use the application, let them choose which environment to connect. Their choices can be stored in the configuration file too. That is a better solution once you have many environments. But you need to redesign some parts of your application.

Hope this information helpful to you.

Sincerely,
Kira Qian
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