The Microsoft community has some bloggings/articles (1, 2, 3, 4) about ClickOnce, their new technology to keep applications up-to-date via the web (application does an update-check over the web, and automatically downloads and installs the latest version). I thought “what’s so new about that?” Java has that too, Oracle’s Application Server has it (see page 24), and so do other programs, albeit it proprietary-coded.
As my loyal readers know by now, a second paragrah in a blogging does mean there’s something more. Indeed. What about the nice DLL-hell on the Microsoft platform? Now you can choose whether you download and install the latest version of that application you run. But with ClickOnce a developer can (not: must) configure ClickOnce to automatically download and install the latest version. Please take that into consideration if you are going to use this new technology. We all know it from Antivirus programs like Norton Antivirus (LiveUpdate), where the user can specify how the updates will be managed. Tell me honestly, did you or did you not have had problems after installing a hotfix from Microsoft? After that you switched to “ask me what to do”, didn’t you? Right, I thought so.
So, in my opinion ClickOnce does not deserve the hype it gets, and developers need to be educated to be careful with it.