Issue with Clickonce installation

Question

Hi,

I have a strange issue with the clickonce deployment, we have publised this to production and we did not see any issues when published and tried in few machines, but now in some machines, when they are trying to install, they are having issues. When the installation is about to complete - they are getting a message "Cannot start the application. Contact the application vendor for assistance". And in the details I am seeing something like -

ERROR SUMMARY
 Below is a summary of the errors, details of these errors are listed later in the log.
 * Activation of http://fsotax.us.na.ey.net/xmlvalidation/K-1%20Suite%20XML%20Bridge.application resulted in exception. Following failure messages were detected:
  + Transaction did not complete. The file name may be too long. Shorten the file name, and try again.
  + The system cannot find the path specified. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070003)

I am confused as this is working in some machines and not working in some machines, could someone let me know how I can fix this please. This is very very critical as the application is in production. Thanks for the help.

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Rpaul

Answer 1

I'm afraid the only way we can do is shorten the application name and its folders name as possible.

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Mike Zhang[MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us

Answer 2

Hi Mike,

Thanks very much for the reply, if it was to do with the long file names, how is it working in some machines and we are seeing issues only with few machines? I am confused. Could you please let me know on this?.

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Rpaul

Answer 3

Since the ClickOnce published application is installed in the User profile directory, if the User account name is too long, then I think it would increase the long path possibility.

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Mike Zhang[MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us

Answer 4

Hi Mike,

Is there a limitation set - what is the maximum number of characters that the path can contain? Thanks again for your reply.

Also I want to know on another behavior, say we have published some updates to the location where the appliation is already present; the user will get the prompt to download the update when he starts the app in his machine, and say he chose not to download the update, the application does not prompt for the update next time it is started, is there a way to get this prompt again?

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Rpaul

Answer 5

MAX_PATH: 260 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(VS.85).aspx#maximum_path_length

Before the end user really have no way to solve this issue, they only can uninstall and re-install the product again, and the way developer can do is use a minimum required version to force the end user upgrade the application. This is the way we can think out, it is also the way we can find from internet.

But, today, I use the "Process Monitor" to watch which file or registry logged this flag, (base on my experience to think out there maybe such a flag to help ClickOnce work), but failed. So I try to find some clues form ClickOnce log, it has a record named "UpdateSkippedDeployment", that is our research target.

For any details you can look into my this research article: http://mikedoszhang.blogspot.com/2012/01/clickonce-help-your-users-can-upgrade.html

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Mike Zhang[MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us

Answer 6

Hi Mike,

Your answers were of great help, much appreciated. Thanks a lot for all the help.

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Rpaul

Answer 7

You're welcome!

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Mike Zhang[MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us