Is it possible to deploy a native Delphi application with ClickOnce

Question

Is it possible to deploy a native Delphi application with ClickOnce without a stub C# exe that would be used to launch the Delphi application?

The same question applies to VB6, C++ and other native Windows applications.

Answer 1

Personally, I build my own mechanism to kick off self update process when my application timestamp is out of sync with the server. Not too difficult, but it's not a simple task.

By the way, for Delphi you can use some thirdparty help:

http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/wupdate.asp

UPDATED:

For my implementation:

MyApp.EXE will run in 3 different modes

1. MyApp.EXE without any argument. This will start the application typically.

   1.1 The very first thing it does is to validate its own file-time with the server.

   1.2 If update is required then it will download the updated file to the file named "MyApp-YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS.exe"

   1.3 Then it invoke "MyApp-YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS.exe" with command argument

   MyApp-YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS.exe  --update MyApp.EXE
   

   1.4 Terminate this application.

   1.5 If there is no update required then the application will start normally from 1.1

2. MyApp.EXE --update "FILENAME".

   2.1 Try copying itself to "FILENAME" every 100ms until success.

   2.2 Invoke "FILENAME" when it success

   2.3 Invoke "FILNAME --delete MyApp-YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS.exe" to delete itself.

   2.4 Terminate

3. MyApp.EXE --delete "FILENAME"

   3.1 Try deleting the file "FILENAME" every 500ms until success.

   3.2 Terminate

I've already been using this scheme for my application for 7 years and it works well. It could be quite painful to debug when things goes wrong since the steps involve many processes. I suggest you make a lot of trace logging to allow simpler trouble-shooting.

Good Luck

Answer 2

No, the entry point to your app needs to be managed code.

This is from a blog post by Brian Noyes, one of the main authorites on ClickOnce and author of Smart Client Deployment with ClickOnce.

If you app is REALLY legacy (i.e. VB6, MFC, ATL, etc.), as in an unmanaged code executable, then no, you cannot deploy it as an executable through ClickOnce.

The accepted workaround seems to be a managed code stub exe that launches the main exe.