Deploy with Crystal

I am in the process of writing a small application to assist our HR department in evaluating employees that I wish to deploy to our entire company (about 80 people). The previous version of the application runs as a web application but has the normal web limitations. The primary reason that it was developed as a web application is because I didn't want to have to maintain an application on all of those workstations.

Now with ClickOnce I am hoping that I can redevelop this application and deploy it to each workstation without any extra work on my part. I am aware that the .Net Framework 2.0 has to be installed on all computers for ClickOnce to work. Other than that what do I need to consider when building my application My requirements are pretty simple, except that I will definately have to be able to run a Crystal Report from the application and it would probably be helpful if I could use some 3rd-Party controls. Also, none of my users will have administrator rights on their systems. I have created a small test application that runs a very basic report and tried to install it on one user machine (with no admin rights) and the Crystal portion of the install failed.

Am I going to be able to accomplish this with ClickOnce How can I distribute the Crystal components in a way that my users can install them

Thanks for any help.

Todd Sparks

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Deploy with Crystal

Michael Gomez
My bad, thanks Elizabeth for pointing this out. Yes please do make sure you're checking component EULA requirements before carrying as private to the application and do *not* do this if disalllowed by EULA.

Regards,
Sameer
Sathiya Priya R
Todd,

Unfortunately, Sameer's suggestion goes against the Crystal Reports EULA. Even if it works, it should not be done because of legal issues as well as servicing issues it will cause for Crystal Reports. (Please forgive Sameer - he hasn't read the EULA.)

Installing the Crystal Reports redist requires Admin priveledges. Unfortunately, there is no way around this because it does some impactful things. I believe the .NET FX redist is the same way.

Regards,
Elizabeth Maher
Gil Shalit
Todd, have you tried including the Crystal (and any other) components along with your app as assemblies private to the application. They'll get installed by ClickOnce into the application folder (in ClickOnce app store) like any other app assemblies and loaded from there. This should work, let us know if you run into issues.

If the GAC happens to carry a newer copy of the same assembly and has policy to use that one it will win since the loader first looks at the GAC when loading assemblies. But that should work just fine for your scenario. If GAC copy exists it will get loaded else the app carried copy will get loaded.

Btw, your case of wanting to have a client app but being limited by deployment issues is the primary scenario that ClickOnce targets so I really hope you are able to get this working and be able to use ClickOnce and Winforms app for your business needs.

Regards,
Sameer
Deploy with Crystal

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