Summary

Ease of deployment has almost always been a unique feature of web applications. In the past, when it came to deciding on what platform the next application would run, ASP.NET applications always won when the decision came down to ease of deployment.

This chapter illustrates that this is no longer the case. Using ClickOnce deployment, applications can be interactive and easy to deploy with a rich user interface and all the power of the .NET Framework underneath.

In this chapter you saw how to deploy a ClickOnce application and the various deployment options that are available to you as the developer of a ClickOnce application. After you have deployed that application, you need to be able to provide updates, patches, new releases, and so on. This chapter covered the mechanism for updating a ClickOnce application and the various methods by which ClickOnce applications can receive updates.

At this point you should be able to start working with ClickOnce applications and hopefully begin recommending Windows Forms 2.0 as a viable quick-deployment platform and putting an end to the vicious rumor that Windows Forms applications are cumbersome to deploy and maintain.