Using ClickOnce to Deploy .NET Apps - Page 1

In the previous page, you saw an example of an application created using ClickOnce. In this and the next few pages, let's create our own application and deploy it via ClickOnce.

Creating a Simple Application
In order to use ClickOnce, let's first create a very simple C# application. The following steps should help you out:

1. Launch Visual Studio 2005. Go to File | New | Project. From the New Project window, ensure your Project type is set to Visual C# | Windows, and select Windows Application from the Templates pane:

[ create a new Windows Application C# project ]

2. From the same New Project window, set the name of your application to ClickOnceDemo:

[ call your new application ClickOnceDemo ]

After you have given your project the ClickOnceDemo name, press OK to accept the changes and create a blank application.

3. You should see a blank form resembling a Windows window. From your Toolbox, click on the Label component and draw a label in the middle of your form:

[ draw a new label ]

4. Select your newly drawn label with the mouse cursor. Look in your Properties Panel, and find the property labeled Font and expand that property to display the sub-items:

[ expand the Font property from the Properties dock ]

5. In the sub-property labeled Size, replace the value (8.25 in the above screenshot) to 36. Now, scroll down your properties until you find the Text property. Replace label1 with the word ClickOnce.
   
   Your form should look like the following image:

[ how my simple application looks in Visual Studio ]

6. If you want, you can make further adjustments to your form. For example, renaming it to something other than "Form1" or resizing the window to just display the ClickOnce label, etc. Those are visual/aesthetic changes that aren't relevant to this tutorial, so I will not explicitly cover them here.

7. Save this file and test it to see how it looks. The final application should look almost the same as the form you designed in Visual Studio.

Now that we have our sample application working, let's figure out how to deploy it using ClickOnce.

Onwards to the next page!

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