Move a ClickOnce Deployment to Another Server or Location

The goal of this post is to demonstrate how to move a clickonce deployment to another location, be it another server or another folder, without having to publish the package again.

You will need a tool called MageUI.exe which is available for download in the .NET SDK. Once installed you can find it in “Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin\MageUI.exe”.

The first step is to simply copy over the clickonce deployment folder to your new location. Next, open up MageUI.exe and select the Open command from the file menu. Search through your clickonce deployment folder for all instances of *.application files and open all of them. This is important as you will need to make changes to all *.application files for this to work.

For each *.application file, under deployment options, you will need to edit the start location to reflect on the new location you are moving your deployment to. Once you have done this for all files select the save all command from the file menu. You will be prompted to sign your package. One option for signing your package is to generate a .PFX file and point to that, providing the password that you specified when creating it. The other option is to point to a certificate that has already been stored on your machine.

Once saved, test the new deployment location by running the setup file.