How to get a ClickOnce app to show up in the Installed Applications list of Dell KACE

Question

I have a .Net 4.0 application with a WPF UI being deployed to a Windows 7 Enterprise environment via ClickOnce, it is deployed with ClickOnce security settings enabled and it requires full trust. End users are not admins on the machine.

The operations group has asked me to make this application show up under the list of Installed Applications in their enterprise management dashboard (Dell KACE). The application shows up in control panel already and I can uninstall it from there, but it is NOT showing up in this installed apps list via the tool.

From what I can tell this management app is simply reading from HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall and if I manually enter a registry entry in this hive with just a DisplayName value it shows up as desired.

How can I get ClickOnce to add a registry entry to the uninstall list?

Answer 1

There's no good way to do this with ClickOnce. ClickOnce apps are installed under users profile folders. What should show up on the dashboard if one user on the machine has it installed and another user doesn't?

You can write custom code in your app to create the registry entry, but if the user doesn't have security to create it your code won't either. A second problem with that approach is deleting the registry entry when they uninstall.

I think it comes down what's important. Can you switch to an .msi? Is losing the auto-update of ClickOnce a big deal or not? If you have to stick with ClickOnce, you'll have to find a manual work-around. This article is one approach to solving problems like this.