Using Click Once Web Application Self or Auto Update

Question

We have written Web application using ASP.NET MVC, which will be hosted in our customer's in-premise or Intranet web server.

We are ok, if at First time, customer install our app, using Wix/Windows setup installer. Here we are more curious about providing Self-updating or auto-updating capabilities to our app.

Any Idea if we can use Click-Once for that. (We are aware about google's OMAHA (http://code.google.com/p/omaha/) but this requires a new learning curve.)

At some place, answer for this is NO ( Does Windows Installer provide a method to update applications? ).

But I am feel we should be able to do it, with mix of Wix 1st Time Installer + ClickOnce for future updates. as, our web application is just few files in a folder mapped with IIS website configuration.

Answer 1

No, you can't do this. ClickOnce installs files to an obfuscated folder in the current user's profile. You can't have it update files all over the file system.

You may be able to write a completely separate app that is deployed with ClickOnce and is launched with a scheduled task. That app could download the updated files and copy them to your IIS folder.

In short, this isn't what ClickOnce was made for, but you could probably cobble something together that would work.