Bundling only part of the prerequisites with ClickOnce

Question

Is it possible to configure the ClickOnce installation so that it requires .Net Framework and VSTO but includes only the VSTO binaries and downloads .Net Framework if necessary?

Including the VSTO in the package isn't too much of a problem but the 350MB .Net Framework is something I'd do away with if possible. (Dynamics CRM SDK depends on some non-client profile features so I need the full one.)

In most cases the users have the .Net Framework installed so in these cases it's okay to leave the .Net Framework away. Is it still possible to make the published setup download the framework if it's missing on the user computer.

"Download prerequisites from the component vendor's web site" seems to forgo the local VSTO package while the "Download prerequisites from the same location as my application" would require the .Net Framework in the deployment bundle.

Answer 1

You need the VSTO Runtime, there's no way around that, it can not be deployed locally. As for the PIAs, you need those as well, unless you are targeting .NET 4. If you use .NET 4, it will embed the bits of hte PIAs that you need, automatically.

As for .NET, it doesn't download the 350MB package, if you choose 'install from vendor's website', it does an incremental install of just the bits it needs.

By the way, we track this in our customers, and after Microsoft started pushing .NET 3.5 as a critical Windows Update, the % of our customers who have it installed went up to 90%. So in most cases, people will already have it installed.

Answer 2

Perhaps not exactly what you want but if you use .NET 4.0, then you can use NoPIA feature and eliminate need for office binaries.