ClickOnce deployment error - access to the path is denied

Question

I have a WPF application that I'm deploying to a network path using ClickOnce deployment. After the application is deployed to a network location, I use the ClickOnce HTML page to launch the installation process. I am successfully able to download and install the application.

However, my users are not able to download and install the application. When a user navigates to the ClickOnce HTML page and clicks to begin the installation process, the following error message is received:

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ERROR SUMMARY
        Below is a summary of the errors, details of these errors are listed later in the log.
        * Activation of http://software.mycompany.com/myapp/myapp.application resulted in exception. Following failure messages were detected:
                    + Downloading file://dev/webs/software/myapp/myapp.application did not succeed.


        * [4/5/2010 1:56:59 PM] System.Deployment.Application.DeploymentDownloadException (Unknown subtype)
                    - Downloading file://dev/Webs/software/myapp/myapp.application did not succeed.

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All signs point to this being a security issue. So, I've done the following:

• Ensured that "Everyone" had read access to the files that were being deployed as part of my project

• Ensured that "Everyone" had read access to the network location where the application was deployed (//dev/webs/software/myapp)

• Ensured that "Everyone" had read access to the IIS path where the ClickOnce HTML page is located

In each of these cases, I've made no progress in getting the application to successfully deploy via ClickOnce.

Again, the odd thing is that I am able to successfully walk through the process of downloading and installing the application. It's my users, though, that need the ability to download and install the application.

I've looked extensively on the web for answers, but there hasn't been much. I'd like to resolve the issue without "re-installing" or "rigging" anything.

Solution

I'm guessing that you are publishing your files to a network location that is only exposed to your clients via a web server. In that case, in the publish tab of your project properties, your Installation Folder URL is incorrect (or has not been specified). You can see that by looking at the error message. The user is accessing a http:// URL, but ClickOnce is trying to download a file from a file:// URL, which the client probably can't access. You should set the Installation Folder URL to http://software.mycompany.com/myapp/ so that ClickOnce knows from where to download the application.