While we use the software internally, it is an external product.
(
http://www.goldmail.com) Anybody can sign up for it. There's a free
version, although I'm not certain how obvious that is from the signup -- I
think when you get to the page where you talk about $, you find the free
version there. They recently changed that, and I haven't checked it out yet.
We haven't noticed any problems with the bandwidth. However, we are using a
Content Delivery Network to deploy the application widely. We have thousands
of users, and hope that number grows, and we need to have a scalable
solution. Internally for QA purposes, we deploy our app for about 30 people
on our local server, and haven't had any problems with it.
For testing, if you are running IIS on your machine, you can deploy to your
own web server by publishing to
http://localhost/appname. I do this for
testing the deployment, and then install it on the same machine, or
sometimes a different one.
Our application is only about 10MB. When the user installs it the first
time, it checks for .Net 2.0 and installs as a prerequisite if necessary
(from MSFT's website). I think we've had some issues here and there with
that, especially on older machines. (Technically, we only support XP and
Vista).
Every time the user runs the app, it checks for an update. If there is one,
it only copies over the updated files. It runs really fast. We're
considering doing forced updates, and it runs so fast it's almost
negligible. There's no additional chatter, until the user exits and runs the
app again.
ClickOnce also provides an API, so if you don't want to do automatic updates
through the deployment, you can put an option on a menu and let the user
check for updates. We weren't keen about this, because we all know how often
we voluntarily update anything.
RobinS.
GoldMail, Inc.
--------------------------------
jim said:
Robin,
Is your Company's ClickOnce implementation for internal software or
external users? Also, what have you noticed about the bandwidth
requirements of running a ClickOnce application? Is ClickOnce very
"chatty" or does it require careful planning to contain bandwidth costs?
Thanks!
Jim