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Is there a way to rename a deployed ClickOnce application?

My company has a ClickOnce application that has been used with our customers for about a year now.

We are rebranding and want to change the name of the application. However, just changing all the standard name parameters in Visual Studio, and then creating a new deployment, obviously changes the manifests that the existing application is looking for, so almost all installed applications never see new updates.

I tried to communicate with the .application file, but so far I could not get anything to work. Is there a way to rename a deployed ClickOnce application or do we need to get people to just install a new application?

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If you want to run two different versions of the application, all you need to change is the assembly name to make ClickOnce a different version. This makes me wonder if the assembly name of the main application will change if it still appears as ClickOnce as the same application.

If you need to change the assembly name (and I would like), you will have to uninstall and reinstall the application. You can do this programmatically for them; it only takes a minute.

The MSDN article, "Certificate Expiration When Deploying ClickOnce," when a ClickOnce certificate expires, shows how to programmatically remove a ClickOnce application and reinstall it from another URL (code is available). We have done this several times, and it works very well and is not intrusive to users.

I am sure that you cannot just create a new version for the new URL and copy the deployment manifest to the old deployment folder, because you change the application identifier and do not recognize it as an update, but you can always try.

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If you did not embed it in the application, you need to redeploy it. You can rename the file, but the GUI will not be changed without code in the code to do this.

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This MSDN article may be helpful:

Walkthrough: Manually Deploying a ClickOnce Application

In one of the message states, the following is true.

Unfortunately, the Mage does not have the functionality to support .deploy-renaming. Workaround:

  • Generate the application manifest.
  • Sign the application manifest.
  • Add the .deploy extension to all files except the .manifest file
  • Create an application manifest, change the deployment tag, and add the parameter mapFileExtensions="true" .
  • Sign the application manifest.
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