15/12/2008 21:13:42

ClickOnce is a great way of distributing software and it's been
a real life saver for one of the projects I've been working on.

Basically it allows you to publish an application every time you
have a working build and all customers will get the new version automatically
the next time they start the software. Users don't have to go through the motions
of uninstalling old versions, copying files and so on.

On more than one occasion I had the customer calling me to report a problem
and by the time the conversation was over I had already published an updated version.
It's kinda nice to tell the customer "Please restart the application, there ya go... it works".

There's a lot more to ClickOnce than easy deployment, such as sandboxing
and fine grained security but that's not what this post is about.

While using ClickOnce I tend not to worry about deployment problems,
and without giving it any further thought I published the application from
my laptop after making a few tweaks while I was on the road.

I've learned never to try that again...

The software published just fine... but after updating the clients
started crashing and the entire update system collapsed.

After quite a long time of bug hunting I finally realized it might
have had something to do with the fact that I published from another pc.

I came home, updated the source repository, published from my dev-machine
and all was well again... Bottom line: only publish from a single computer.

PS: Google either uses or mimicks the ClickOnce deployment technology,
can anybody confirm this?