In the last SF calss Trent mentioned that you had developed a custom solution for distributing client software for your medical apps rather than usning MS one-click deployment. I don't remember all of the details so it would be helpful if you could provide a brief outline of the approach you took and any issues I should look out for.

-Larry

I glad it was helpful. Let me know if you have any other questions, I'll try to help out!

I've gotten some PM regarding the program I used to make the screen shots I used in the Click-Once post. I figured I'd just post it here for anyone curious.



I used Snag-It (http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp). If my memory is correct, I learned about it right here in this forum, when someone asked the SF guys (or maybe it was Ivan) what program they used. I'm also pretty sure that SF uses it for screen captures in their help files. In any case, it is a rocking program!

Yup, every day   It is a good app!

Figured I'd just keep this thread going

So, for the most part, using a deployment project to create windows installer (MSI) vs. Clickonce has paid off and everything is finally working how we want with separate test/live environments, etc.

However, one snag I ran into which I had a somewhat difficult time figuring out, was with performing upgrades.  There are all sorts of how-to articles on the web which are outdated (ie. apply to VS 2005) - apparently, with 2008 deployment projects there is yet another version that must be taken into account and that is the "file" version.  In other words, incrementing the installer version and productcode is not enough. ANY files which are being deployed and have their own "file" version (ie. .NET assemblies) must have that version incremented as well if you want those files replaced.  This is true even if you have RemovePreviousVersions set to True.  That said, I finally got our upgrade to work by changing the file version (which is located just below the assembly version in the VS 2008 IDE Assembly information dialog) and can also be set in the assemblyinfo.vb file like so:

My concern is now with Strataframe assemblies... Does Microfour increment the file version on these?  Reason I ask is that I see the following when I view the source project in VS:

In the assemblyinfo.vb I don't see any file version, however, in the dll I see:

So, I'm not sure where the 1.6.5.3 comes from and also do not know if this doesn't change and there are SF dll updates, will these get updated on the client deployment correctly?

See file versioning rules:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368599(VS.85).aspx

Again, this is new with 2008.  2005 as long as you bumped the installer version and had RemovePreviousVersion all files would be replaced.

By the way, thanks to Charles Hankey for telling me to use IE so I could insert images the correct way.  Didn't even think to try that last week when I was having all sorts of trouble doing this.

Doh! Here I go again answering my own questions.  Actually looked at the assemblyversion.vb file (there are actually more than one of these in the DBengine project?)

And saw this:

[codesnippet]<Assembly: AssemblyFileVersionAttribute(MicroFour.StrataFrame.BuildInformation.BuildVersion)>[/codesnippet]

So I'm guessing that means this is part of your build process and I should not worry about it....

Correct, that is part of our build process which assigns the file version to our assemblies.