How to: Publish an Initial Version of an Application

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To use ClickOnce for deployment, you must first publish the initial version of the application and have users launch it through a link to the deployment manifest. With a simple Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application, this can be done by publishing from Visual Studio. With a composite WPF application that dynamically loads modules not referenced in the Visual Studio shell project, you have to perform some extra steps to prepare the published application for deployment.

Note

To publish your application in Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7), the IIS 6 Metabase and IIS 6 Configuration Compatibility component is also required. To deploy the application from IIS7, you will need to change the Application Pool basic setting for the virtual directory to the Classic .NET AppPool instead of the Default .NET AppPool.
In addition, you must run Visual Studio in the context of an administrator account. By default, Windows runs applications in a limited-privilege user account even when you are logged on to the computer as an administrator. To run Visual Studio with administrative privileges, right-click the Visual Studio icon, and then click Run as administrator.

To publish an initial version of a composite WPF application with the Manifest Manager Utility

  1. In Visual Studio, set the publish settings for the project and publish the shell application.
  2. Open the Manifest Manager Utility, and then open the deployment manifest.
  3. Select the additional files you need to add to the application.
  4. Save the manifests.
  5. Provide your users with a URL to the deployment manifest.

For more information about this procedure, see Automated: Publishing an Initial Version of an Application.

To manually publish an initial version of a composite WPF application

  1. In Visual Studio, set the publish settings for the project and publish the shell application.
  2. Copy the module files that will be dynamically loaded into the shell to the publish folder, and then add the file name extension .deploy to them.
  3. Run Mageui.exe and update the application manifest to include the modules and any associated file resources.
  4. Save and sign the application manifest.
  5. In the Manifest Generating and Editing tool (Mage), open the deployment manifest, and then refresh the application manifest reference.
  6. Save and sign the deployment manifest.
  7. Provide a URL to the deployment manifest to your users.

For more information about this procedure, see Manual: Publishing an Initial Version of an Application.

Retired Content

This content is outdated and is no longer being maintained. It is provided as a courtesy for individuals who are still using these technologies. This page may contain URLs that were valid when originally published, but now link to sites or pages that no longer exist.