Is it Possible to use Click Once Deployment with F#?

Question

I was going to use Click Once for my F# project but it seems this is not supported within VS2010 - is there a way to make it work? If not, what would be an alternative?

The application will be used by Sales people on Windows 7 Tablets with no internet connection.

My thinking was to use ClickOnce so that they could check for updates each morning / evening (where they have internet) before going off to do Sales (no internet)

Answer 1

There's no integrated IDE-level support for ClickOnce in F# projects, however...

One possible approach is to ship a C# app via ClickOnce, but put all of your important logic in an F# project which is then referenced by the (mostly-empty) C# shell. I've done this several times in the past, and it has worked quite well.

Alternatively, the .NET framework provides MAGE (and its GUI equivalent MAGEUI) for building and editing ClickOnce manifests outside of Visual Studio. Using these tools, while workable, definitely doesn't feel as "smooth" as the IDE-integrated equivalent.

Finally, there's ClickOnceMore, which claims to fill much of the same role as MAGEUI, but with a better feature set. Personally, I've never used it, so I can't comment. But there you have it.

Answer 2

I use this F# script to automate calls to the command-line mage.exe to build a ClickOnce package for my F# project. I first used MAGEUI to build the *.application file and such manually - the script just updates the file list and build number, and creates the zip file.