Software and UX

Recently, in developing the Scrum Sprint Monitor, I came across a situation that deviated my ClickOnce deployment from the standard. I needed to add an “AddIns” subfolder to the deployment folder, in order to isolate my MEF addins from my Prism modules (they seem not to play nice together, since my Prism setup will enumerate the deployment folder, loading all DLLs into memory, and on the other hand, MEF will not try to load imports from DLLs that are already loaded into memory).

In any case, I had no choice but to isolate the DLLs in separate folders, and I didn’t really want to have to learn the nuts and bolts of ClickOnce just to solve this one problem.

The problem

I have two deployment scenarios: xcopy deployment and ClickOnce deployment. On the ClickOnce scenario, I deploy a fixed set of addins – non-configurable, for simplicity reasons. I wanted to start deploying a single known DLL (generated by a dependent project), into the AddIns\ServerAdapters folder. I initially had the app project set up to include a reference to the addin project, in order to have the addin DLL included in the deployment. Unfortunately, there is no way to choose the folder the DLL will end up in. It will just be deployed alongside the application, on the root folder. Moving the DLL elsewhere seemed to require me to start editing the manifest file, instead of relying on Visual Studio to maintain it for me – not something I was looking forward to at this point.

After scouring the web for information, I gathered some bits and pieces that got me to a workable, and simple solution: if you add a file to your deployment project and mark it as “Build Action: Content”, Visual Studio 2008 will include that file in the Publish|Install Mode and Settings|Application Files dialog. While I have seen other people include a DLL in the project in order to have Visual Studio include it in the deployment, inserting a link seemed like a cleaner solution (and it actually worked!):

1. Right-click on the folder you wish to add the DLL to;
   
2. Click Add|Existing Item…
   
3. Select the file in question and click in the drop-down arrow of the Add button:
   
4. Select “Add As Link”.
5. Now you have the target DLL listed in your project:
6. Next, you’ll need to set the properties for the DLL, marking it as ”Build Action: Content”. This will make it a part of the deployment.
    

After that I could see the DLL listed in Application Files:

I only had to take care not to accept TFS’ suggestion to add the DLL to source control (just Undo Pending Changes for that file). This solved my deployment problem, and I managed to avoid having to use a tool like mageui.exe or ManifestManagerUtility just to accomplish this seemingly simple task.