Quick Overview of ClickOnce
I was talking with a local customer the other day that was in the process of designing their next generation enterprise architecture. Their current architecture was really a mix of applications and data silos spread across many different systems. As part of the requirements discussion we hit on one of my favorite architectural trade offs – Smart Client or Thin Client? Like many other customers this is one of the many fundamental decision points. They loved the deployment ease of Web applications but needed the rich interface and offline access of Smart Clients. As we started to discuss this point, I explained one of the new features of Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 – ClickOnce deployment.
The goal of ClickOnce deployment is to provide a way to deploy a Windows based rich client using the Web. Fundamentally, ClickOnce enables the user to select a link on a Web Page or email which then downloads and installs or runs the application. ClickOnce provides the ability for applications to be deployed both online and offline which is an enhancement over the traditional No Touch Deployment and Application Updater Block within Visual Studio 2003.
I took the opportunity to record a short demonstration that I shared with them. The video can be viewed here.