Developing Dane

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . Let me be clear; I love Microsoft's ClickOnce. I've found it to be an absolutely fantastic deployment methodology for many scenarios. It allows developers to create full featured applications and deploy them to end users with little or no pain. Essentially ClickOnce allows for a thick client application to be deployed as easily as any thin client. The core product of the company I work for is an enterprise finance and billing suite for local governments. In 2004 we began migrating our application to .NET developing under version 1.1. We implemented the primary client layer as a WinForms applications and its initial release consisted of roughly 150 assemblies. Historically Windows client installations had always been a significant paint point for our customer's internal IT staffs and therefore for us. During early R&D efforts for the new .NET application we were intrigued by a feature being called &q