Importance of ClickOnce Deployment

ClickOnce deployment is a deployment technology for smart clients; if you have ever built any smart clients, you will be agreed that as of now , they are built using No-Touch deployment. Though No touch deployment in itself is great but contain few issues that needs to be resolved. Some of those issues with No touch deployment are

1) Smart Client applications cannot check for updates on their deployment server
2) They cannot incrementally update themselves

Let’s think of how to build an auto update feature in No touch deployment. For doing this, a developer needs to write and implement this feature but in ClickOnce, a smart client auto update feature is built into the framework which is responsible for checking for the application updates automatically. Obviously, these are smart client applications written using .NET FX 2.0 to take advantage of ClickOnce but the developer doesn’t write any code for update check or to pull down updates. If an update is detected, it can be pulled down incrementally or in whole by the ClickOnce subsystem it makes the updating of Smart Clients very easy