ClickOnce, yeah right

I’ve just committed vdaExtensions 1.1 to SVN: I had had enough of stressing out about minor aspects of the user interface and just went for it and published the application. Only to discover that ClickOnce wasn’t working on the target desktops, doh!

The problem was with the assemblies for the ReportViewer class. I have SQL Server 2005 Express installed on my machine and so had no problems with the app getting access to the appropriate libraries at runtime, but it didn’t look like the .dlls in question were being included in the published solution even when the assemblies were being included via Project Properties > Publish > Application Files and Copy Local was enabled in the References section.

Thankfully Google came to my rescue yet again and I found some info on interfering with the Report Viewer redistributable and I was able to get my hands on the .dll files which I then referenced in the project and bingo! the ClickOnce installer wasn’t complaining about ReportViewer any more, it was now giving me bother concerning ADODB…

A bit more googling provided me with an msi for the Office 2003 assemblies and a program to extract the .dll goodness from it. I referenced the resulting adodb.dll and specified for it to be copied into the build directory and that was thankfully the end of that mini-drama.

I wasn’t too keen on the idea of ClickOnce when I first started with .NET but I must admit that I’ve warmed to it within the context of a Windows domain and with users who don’t have full administrative privileges on their workstations. Or it just might be that I’m less of a Microsoft bashing, Linux fanboi these days! Right tool for the job at hand and all that.

It’s now onto pastures new: I’ve created a new solution in Visual Studio and set it up with a Subversion repository, my only hope being that somebody in the office will actually use this software I’m creating!