ClickOnce on Apache
I have been playing with Microsoft’s ClickOnce technology as a means to easily deliver development snapshots to customers without much hassle. This avoids having to have a rather nontechnical user deal with installs or god forbid subversion checkouts. Instead the application looks for new version when it loads and if it finds a newer version published will automatically update itself for the user. I couldn’t dream of an easier way to push out software.
That said no wonderful Microsoft technology is not without some ridiculous limitation that makes you want to burn Redmond to the ground. I should point out that ClickOnce doesn’t allow for http authentication. So you can’t just toss in a .htaccess and .htpasswd file to protect the install. You’ll get an access denied error on install. Stupid.
The upside is that ClickOnce can be run on apache. While you can’t magically publish it via http (without FrontPage server extension for apache being installed) you can publish it via ftp and go from there. You just need a .htaccess file at the install root with the following settings:
1 2 3 4 | AddType application/x-ms-application application AddType application/x-ms-manifest manifest AddType application/octet-stream deploy AddType application/x-msdownload dll |
This will tell apache what to do with the files when the ClickOnce executable wants to install your files. Now you can use ClickOnce without the need for IIS running on a windows machine somewhere on the web.