Microsoft Click-Once doesn't work properly under Parallels on Mac?

Question

I have an application that uses Microsoft's Click-Once to deploy. Works fine on windows based machines but clients using a Parallels instance on Mac have an issue. It installs fine the first time but then never gets updates unless they uninstall and re-install the program.

I imagine it has something to do with the odd location Click-once installs.

Anyone know how to get around this issue?

Answer 1

The problem turned out to be due to the way spotlight acts. The user was typing the name of the application into spotlight and it found the app, but spotlight finds and calls the EXE directly not the click-once bootstrapper. If the application was ran normally by clicking it's icon everything worked fine.

Answer 2

What browser are you using in Windows in Parallels? Is it IE? What version of Windows?

Can you turn on enhanced logging and see what's going on?

If you publish an update, the app doesn't pick it up, right? What happens if you type in the URL to the deployment manifest when there's an update? (that's installation url + yourappname.application). If it picks up the update, then run fiddler and see if it is hitting that same URL to check for an update when you actually run the application. (You have it set to check for updates before running the app, right?)

This is not because of the "odd location Click-once installs". Those files are in the user's profile so the app doesn't require admin privileges to run. It sounds more like a connectivity issue to me. If we can get some more information, I'll see if the ClickOnce guy at Microsoft has any ideas about what's going on. (Note: I use VMware Fusion on my Mac Book Air, and have no problem with ClickOnce).