How to: Publish an Updated Version of an Application

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After your application is published and users have installed the application and are using it, you may need to roll out updates to add new functionality or to provide bug fixes. With the default automatic updating capability of ClickOnce, this involves simply publishing a new version of your application.

You have the option of overwriting the previous version on the deployment server or publishing a new version alongside the previous version. Frequently, it is better to do the latter so that you can easily switch to the previous version if there is a problem with the new version.

For the automated and manual versions of this procedure, you will make a small modification to one of the modules of the ConfigurationModularity QuickStart application and will publish a new version with that change through a ClickOnce update.

To publish a new application version

  1. Make the desired modifications to the application for the new release.
  2. Build and test the application.
  3. Publish the new version from Visual Studio if the updates are contained in the shell application or any referenced assemblies or directly update the published version on the deployment server if the changes are contained in dynamically loaded modules.

Note

If you publish from Visual Studio and need to update the manifests with a tool after publishing to add additional modules, your publication will be in an inconsistent state until you finish updating the manifests. Visual Studio directly updates the default deployment manifest. If there are client computers running that will check for updates in the time between when you publish from Visual Studio and when you finish updating the manifests with a tool, they will see the update in the default deployment manifest and may download an inconsistent update. As a result, you should publish updates to a location where no one will be checking for updates until the update is in a consistent state and is ready to be distributed to client computers. After that, you can copy it to the real publish location to make it go live.

For more information about this procedure, see Automated: Publish an Updated Version of an Application or Manual: Publish an Updated Version of an Application.

For more information about deploying WPF applications with ClickOnce, see Deploying WPF Applications with ClickOnce.

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