Developing Dane

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . Background In a  post two years ago I expressed my admiration of ClickOnce. At the time we'd experienced years of tremendous success using it as our client application's primary deployment mechanism and since that time it has not faltered. I now regret to say that over the last year I've seen evidence that makes me question continued reliance on ClickOnce. I think its life-cycle may be coming to end. Though that saddens me I understand that in the tech world all technology is transient and the best ideas don't always last as long as they should (see Silverlight). Data, however, must continue flowing. About eight months ago I started searching for alternative deployment mechanism which might provide some of the benefits we'd leveraged with ClickOnce. That search came up mostly wanting. However, one candidate identified was the open source project Squirrel.Windows . The moniker on the GitHub proj...

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 ...