Deploying windows applications using ClickOnce (Visual Studio 2008)

ClickOnce deployment allows you to publish Windows-based applications to a Web server or network file share for simplified installation. Visual Studio provides full support for publishing and updating applications deployed with ClickOnce. ClickOnce deployment is available for projects created with Visual Basic, Visual C#, and Visual J#, but not for Visual C++.
You can publish a ClickOnce application in three different ways: from a Web page, from a network file share, or from media such as a CD-ROM. A ClickOnce application can be installed on an end user's computer and run locally even when the computer is offline, or it can be run in an online-only mode without permanently installing anything on the end user's computer.

Open visual studio 2008 IDE and create a new windows application.


Go to Project –> <Application Name> Properties –> Publish


Publish Location
Publishing folder location can be either web site (http://www.mydomain.com/installation/), ftp (ftp://mydomain/installation) or file share. If you are using other than a file share to deployment, then you can provide a Installation Folder URL, since the end users may not have the permission to access the publishing folder directly. (Since I am using a shared path, installation folder URL will not be required)

Install Mode and Settings
If you select ‘The application is available online only’, each time it is run, it will be run from the published location and no start menu icon will be created.
But selecting ‘The application is available offline as well’, A shortcut on the Start menu will be created for the application and it will enable the application to be run when the user is disconnected from the network.

Publish Version
Here you should state the publish version (Not the application version). And if you check ‘Automatically increment revision with each publish’ will make sure that the revision number will get incremented automatically when you publish your application.

Application Files

Sometimes it is necessary to publish other files than the application. So this is where you state which ones to include or exclude from the deployment.

Prerequisites

You can create a setup file to install the prerequisites, which are required by your application in order to function correctly. And all required prerequisites are selected automatically. But if you want you can either add or remove them from your prerequisites setup.

Updates

In this window you should define how your application should be updated. Check ‘The application should check for updates’. And choose whether it should be updated before or after the application starts. If you choose to update it after running the application, you can mention whether you want to check each time it runs or can mention a time period, which it should check. But it is always advisable to check before application starts, so users will get the latest updates each time they run the application.
And mention a minimum required version, so that end user will get the mentioned version of the application, if they have an older version installed on their pc.
If the updating location is other than the publish location, please mention the path.

Save settings and go to the form designer and add a label to the form.

Save and go to Build –> Publish <Application Name>

If you wish do any changes to the publish settings which you completed earlier click next or click on the finish button.

Click next

Click next

And the deployment setup will be created in the published path.

Run the setup.exe to install the application. And click on install button.



Now close the application and change the label to ‘Version 1.0.0.1’. And go to publish settings and on the update window change the minimum required version to 1.0.0.1.

Click ok and save settings and publish the application.
There will be a start menu shortcut from the first installation.

Click on that to run the application. You will see an update screen and the updated application will be downloaded, installed and executed.

Above mentioned are the basic steps which is required to deploy a .Net windows application using ClickOnce.

For further information please click here

CodeProject

Visual Studio 2010 and Smart Device Development - Disappointing

Visual Studio 2010 does not support mobile application development for versions of Windows Phone prior to Windows Phone OS 7.0.

For information about using Visual Studio 2010 to create applications for Windows Phone OS 7.0, see Windows Phone Development and Silverlight for Windows Phone.

For Visual Studio 2008 mobile developers, Microsoft released the Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Tool Kit, which works with the Windows Mobile 6 SDK.

Because Visual Studio 2010 does not support mobile application development for Windows Phone prior to Windows Phone OS 7.0, you cannot use the following features: .NET Compact Framework projects, Visual C++ device projects, smart device CAB projects, Device Emulator and Device Emulator Manager, testing tools for device projects, and Device Security Manager.

Mobile application development is still supported in earlier versions of Visual Studio, such as Visual Studio 2008. For more information about smart device projects, see Windows Mobile Developer Center and Smart Device Development in Visual Studio 2008.

VMWare – Shutting down of guests take long time - Resolved

People who uses virtual machines, using vmware might have noticed that when shutting down the guest operating system, it takes hell of a time to shutdown.
This can be fixed by adding these to the .vmx file

prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100"

mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE" 

mainMem.partialLazySave = "FALSE"

mainMem.partialLazyRestore = "FALSE"

Above mentioned filed is located, where the .vmdk file is located.

Problem with connecting to the SQL Server database on development machine from the Pocket PC Emulator using Visual Studio 2008 - Resolved

When developing application for Smart Devices, we usually debug it using the Emulators which was provided by the Visual Studio installation. And one of the difficulties that we come across is when we try to connect our Smart Device to the SQL Server which is in our development machine.

    ** For this example I will be using Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008

Here are the steps for resolving that issue:
1. First of all download and install the Virtual PC. Because this is required to set up the Virtual Machine Network Driver for Microsoft Device Emulator (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=46859). The installation process is a pretty straight forward one and make sure that the Visual Studio IDE or the Smart Device Emulator is not running.

2. From network settings, right click on the Local Area Network (Network Connection) and select Properties and make sure that the Virtual Machine Network Services option is checked


3. For this I will be using the sample “Adventure Works Database”, and it can be downloaded from the CodePlex community site (http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/37109)

4. Open Visual Studio IDE. Create a new Smart Device project. Use any name (Here I have used SampleSmartDeviceApplication) and select required framework from the list (I have chosen 3.5)


5. Choose the target platform, .NET Compact Framework and the Template from the next screen. I have chosen “Pocket PC 2003”, “.Net Compact Framework Version 2.0” and “Device Application”.



6. In Visual Studio IDE open Tools—>Options. And from the window select Device Tools—>Devices and choose your device (I have chosen Pocket PC 2003 SE Emulator)


7. Click on the properties button and from the device properties window, select “TCP Connect Transport” as the Transport and click on the Configure… button.

8. And use select the option “Use specific IP address” and type an appropriate IP address. (I have typed 192.168.0.190 since my development machine IP address is 192.168.0.198)


9. Click ok and close the TCP/IP Transport window. Click on the Emulator button. And from the Emulator Properties window select the Network tab and check on the “Enable NE2000 PCMCIA network adapter and bind to” and select your network adapter.

10. Click the ok button and close the window. And click on the ok button and close the Smart Device Emulator properties window. Click on the OK button and close the Options window.
11. Add a button (button1) and a Grid (dataGrid1) to the form. And add the “System.Data.SqlClient” reference to the project.

12. Double click on the button and add the following code.


    string zCon = "Password=blogpassword;Persist Security Info=True;
    User ID=bloguser;Initial Catalog=AdventureWorks;
    Data Source=192.168.0.198\\sql2k8";
    SqlConnection objCon = new SqlConnection(zCon);
    objCon.Open();
    SqlCommand objCommand = new SqlCommand("select ProductID,Name,ProductNumber from Production.Product", objCon);
    DataSet dsData = new DataSet();
    SqlDataAdapter da = new SqlDataAdapter(objCommand);
    da.Fill(dsData);
    dataGrid1.DataSource = dsData.Tables[0];
    objCon.Close();



13. Run the application and select Pocket PC 2003 SE Emulator and click on deploy.





14. Click on the “button1”. Then you get the following results.

Unable to add data connection. The DataConnectionDialog could not be initialized. - Resoved

When you try to add data connection (MS SQL Server) through the server explorer, sometimes you get the following error.

In order to resolve this you need to do a change in the windows registry.
Close visual studio IDE and open the registry editor and navigate to 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0' and change it to 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0Bak' (What ever you want).

Restart visual studio IDE.

The type initializer for 'crystaldecisions.crystalreports.engine.reportdocument' threw an exception - Resolved

Today I got this error, when I tried to deploy an application developed using Visual Studio 2005 and Crystal Reports 10.

I googled the problem and found out many solutions which worked for many people. But only one solution worked for me. Anyway I will post all the things that I have tried.

Solution #1

Run ‘CRRedist2005_x86.msi’. This file can be found on ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\BootStrapper\Packages\CrystalReports’. And if you have already installed this you will be prompted to Repair or Uninstall. But none is required if it’s already installed.

Solution #2

Uninstall the Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 using the Visual Studio Instalation DVD and Reinstall it again.

Steps to uninstall the Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005

1. Insert the Setup DVD


2. Select ‘Change or Remove Visual Studio 2005’ (Then the setup will run on Maintenance Mode)


3. Select ‘Add or Remove Features’


4. Uncheck the ‘Crystal Reports For Visual Studio’ checkbox


5. Click on ‘Update’ button


6. Afterwards do the above steps and on step 4 select the ‘Crystal Reports For Visual Studio’ checkbox and click on ‘Update’ button

Solution #3

Create a setup using the Crystal Reports Merge Module, It can be downloaded from http://support.businessobjects.com/downloads/merge_modules.asp. And run it on the deployment machine

Solution #3 worked for me..

Hope this will be helpful to you …………

Get number of days in a month using SQL

Here is a sample to get the number of days in a month, for a given month and a year

declare @zMonth as varchar(2), @zYear as varchar(4)
set @zMonth = '02'
set @zYear = '2009'

select datediff(day,cast(('01-' + @zMonth + '-' + @zYear) as datetime),dateadd(day,-1,dateadd(month,1,cast(('01-' + @zMonth + '-' + @zYear) as datetime)))) + 1

**Please note: The date format of the machine that is running SQL should be 'dd/MM/yyyy'. Or please change the order in query prior using it. Or use the following Code. (Thanks to Rohan for pointing that out)

  

declare @zMonth as varchar(3), @zYear as varchar(4)
set @zMonth = 'Feb'
set @zYear = '2009'

select datediff(day,cast(('01-' + @zMonth + '-' + @zYear) as datetime),dateadd(day,-1,dateadd(month,1,cast(('01-' + @zMonth + '-' + @zYear) as datetime)))) + 1