Haven't seen a good post on how this works anywhere, just know the fix was put in in 3.5. The way it works is pretty complicated, a combination of who issued the certificate, to who, where it is located, etc. Bottom line: If you have an app deployed with an issued certificate, you renew that cert and the issuer nor the subject name do not change (but the expiration and public/private key pair do), updates to the app will succeed whereas before the fix the update with the new cert would block the installation and you had to have users uninstall / reinstall to work around.

Brian Noyes Software Insight brian@softinsight.com www.softinsight.com

Not sure what to tell you there without a repro of what you did. But ClickOnce is really just a fancy file copy mechanism. Chances are something was gooned with the way you were adding things to your project or if you were editing the manifest directly (which is often a better way to go since then the "magic" of VS is out of the loop). Whatever the list of files in the app manifest, that is what ClickOnce will download. If it can't validate the files (based on a file hash) or find them, it barfs with a complaint about the app manifest being invalid. So if you were not getting that, chances are you probably were not getting the files listed in the app manifest correctly. Best way to know for sure, fire up Mageui.exe, open the .exe.manifest file and see what is listed there.

Brian Noyes Software Insight brian@softinsight.com www.softinsight.com

If they are COM unmanaged DLLs, then you need to follow the steps for Reg-Free COM. This article outlines how to do that: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc188708.aspx. For other unmanaged (i.e. C-style DLL calls, it should work fine as long as you include those files as part of the VS project as Content files so they end up in the Application Files listing under the Publish tab in project properties, and that youo make sure they are in the project root folder so that they end up in the same folder as the exe when deployed by ClickOnce.

Brian Noyes Software Insight brian@softinsight.com www.softinsight.com

The certificate problem has been fixed in .NET 3.5 and .NET 2.0 SP2. One specific (by design, maybe not best design) limitation of ClickOnce: you have no control over the install directory, it is always in a generated obfuscated directory under the user's profile.

Brian Noyes Software Insight brian@softinsight.com www.softinsight.com