Richard Dutton » Microsoft

Rolling back to previous ClickOnce versions

richard — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 16:12:23 +0000

I’ve been deploying software using Microsoft’s ClickOnce mechanism a lot lately and despite enjoying its simplicity, especially in comparison to some of the more complicated MSI Setup Projects I’ve inherited, I’ve found myself slightly nervous about its abililty to turn a simple software code update into a potentially massively distributed network of fail with its Auto Updating feature.

Because of this, you occasionally have a rather urgent need to roll back everyone to the last working version, and this turns out to be rather easy.

In the publish’s output folder you will see a file called “.application”. This is the ClickOnce Application Deployment Manifest and contains a load of details about the application and in particular the version to install and where to find it.

You will also see an “Application Files” folder which will contain a folder for each version of your application deployed so far. To revert all of your users to a previous version, simply copy the “.application” file from the relevant version subdirectory over the one in the root, then either point your users at your ClickOnce location or if you had the application set to check for and apply updates automatically just tell them to restart. The application will detect that there is a “newer” version (even if that version is in fact older) and allow the user to install it.

Microsoft 70-511 Exam Passed

richard — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:06:15 +0000

Last week I passed the Microsoft 70-511: Windows Application Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4 exam, making me a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist!

This is the first of four exams I’m aiming to complete in order to become a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer.

Mozilla 1 – Microsoft 1

richard — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:42:57 +0000

After silently installing their own add-ons to Firefox earlier this year as part of a Microsoft Service Pack, it appears that last last week Mozilla finally got around to blocking them on security grounds.

While Microsoft are happy modifying and ‘updating’ other people’s software in one of their updates, they then seem a bit lapse in keeping on top of the ol’ bug fixeroo, one of the primary reasons people flee from IE in the first place.

Prior to Mozilla blocking them, it turns out that this particularly nasty ‘Critical Remote Code Execution’ vulnerability applied not only to IE, but to Firefox installs containing these add-ons. So thanks guys, I’m glad someone’s watching our backs! =)

(Now, who knows what this will do to my WPF XBAP testing? After all that I might have to dust down IE!)