Hello,
I have read some articles now about ClickOnce but none of them answers my question. I hope you can help me.
We have a project here which needs to run on any computer without admin privileges. While we can assume that the target clients will be only Win2000 or Win XP, we don't know if there's a .net Framework 2.0 installed. I know that it's possible to add the .net framework to the ClickOnce Installer, so it will be installed before running the application. But in my opinion I do need admin privileges to install the .net framework The same problem may occur with MDAC Components which must also be updated (up to 2.8) in order to connect to any database.
If these installations are also possible with normal user privileges, than we can use .net 2.0 for developing the application in this project. If not we must use other technologies...
Any help appreciated.
Michael
Click Once Installations without admin privileges
ecdown
Hi Michael,
You do need admin privleges to install .Net Framework or MDAC.
Thanks,
Sameer
Vancho
The best way to think about this is that there are two parts to the installation here and essentially two installers involved:
(1) Installing necessary prerequisites AND
(2) Installing the ClickOnce application
The Visual Studio bootstrapper makes it easy to package and install prerequisites by generating the setup.exe package when publishing the ClickOnce application. But the setup.exe itself is technically *not* a ClickOnce application. The boostrapper is a traditional Windows Installer (MSI) exe which installs the .NET Framework 2.0 redist plus any included prerequisites (such as MDAC) and after these are installed it launches the link to the .application which is the entry point for the ClickOnce application install. The bootstrapper package *does* need admin privileges to install since it is an impactful install, installs components for all users on the machine and puts itself under the \windows directory.
The ClickOnce application part of it however is installed into a per-user location and does not need admin privileges to install or update itself. In a locked down environment you will need SMS or similar mechanism to push out the .NET Framework 2.0 to the desktops under admin context. After that users can launch links to .application files as regular users without requiring admin logon.
Regards,
Sameer