Clickonce application setup always asking to download prerequisites

Question

I deployed a WPF application from the properties -> publish tab in visual studio. To check what happens when I specify prerequisites, I added 'Microsoft Report Viewer 2012 runtime' as required. When I click setup.exe for the first time it automatically installed report viewer on my machine. Now when I try to run the setup.exe again, it is asking my permission to download the required software (the microsoft report viewer is in installed programs). From what I thought clickonce will check if the prerequisite is installed and if installed will skip downloading them. Am I wrong? If not why is this happening?

Answer 1

I've been working on a similar problem. I wanted the newer Access Database Engine redistributable (ACE) to be a prerequisite. I had to make a bootstrapper package for it so it would show up on my list of prerequisites. (This is a ClickOnce, Windows Forms application.) Then every time I would install my app, it would open the ACE installer whether it needed to or not. I added to the bootstrapper's Product.xml file a "InstallCheck" to look in the Registry to see if ACE was installed, and a "InstallCondition" "ByPassIf" to check it. It works now. Here is the page that helped me: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229223.aspx