Click Once or Webforms app

[Terry Holland]

I am designing an application that will be used by users on the corporate
domain.
From one point of view the application would be better suited to a winforms
environment because of the rich features that will be required on the forms.
However, I also need to minimise support & easy deployment is high on list
of priorities which points to ASP.net app on intranet

Users will not have any admin permissions on their pcs so they will not be
able to install an application themselves - they would need a techinician to
carry out the install for them which is not going to be acceptable

Ive tried copying dummy winforms app to share folder and have users run it
from their. This does not work (code security errors) unless the Local
Intranet zone is set to Full Trust using the Configure Code Access Security
Policy wizard. Is this something that could be done centrally to a group of
machines?

Ive also tried to publish dummy winforms app using the Publish Wizard in vs
2005. However, when testing with a user who has 'user' permissions, when
they run the setup.exe from the publish location, they get the message
"Unable to satisfy all prerequisites for TimneLogger_BO_VB. Set-up cannot
continue until all system components have been successfully installed."
Im assuming that this is because they do not have permissions to install.

Is there any way around the problems described above? My alternative is to
reduce the number of features and develop as a webforms app but I wanted to
make sure before going down this path

tia

 

[Terry Holland]

thanks
I will try this when im next in office

ClickOnce deployment is designed to work for users with non-administrative
privileges. However, if you set up a Prerequisite of the .Net framework, and
the user does not have privileges to install it, it will fail. That is
probably what the "Set-up cannot continue until all system components have
been successfully installed" message means.

Either that, are you are accidentally pushing part of your application dll's
as "prerequisite". (Check the application files dialog in the Publish tab).

You want to make sure that all of your references (that are not .net
framework references) are marked as "Copy always" so they are copied over as
local references instead of needing to be installed in the GAC, because you
can't do that w/o privs.

For example, we include DirectX dll's in our project. We have them in a
folder under our project; our references in the other projects map to those
files (not the ones in the GAC). When referenced, they are marked Copy
always.

Give this a try and see if you can get it to work. We deploy our application
to thousands of users with ClickOnce and have been very happy with it.

RobinS.
GoldMail.com