I know that it is possible to pass in parameters via URL to ClickOnce apps launched online. However, most users downloads setup.exe and launch it from their machine. Is there any way that I can re-write setup.exe at download, insert a code (let's say the user's email address), and then have the app launch with knowledge of the code? Assume that we can somehow re-sign setup.exe so that it is legit.
Assume .NET 3.5.
Update The goal here is to pass on either email address and/or referrer information to setup.exe so that even when the user runs the installer from a different machine and a different ip we can figure out who did the referral.
Update 2 Assume .NET 3.5 SP1, does it help? Apparently one can now pass parameters to .application while offline. Is it possible to embed parameters into the setup.exe so that it calls .application?ref=someone right when setup.exe is run?
Well, if your goal is to embed a customer id (email, code, etc) into the exe, the easiest way I can think of is using the IPropertyStorage and IPropertySetStorage interfaces. If you are feeling brave, you could call methods directly on IPropertySetStorage via p/invoke, or you could go the easy route and use Microsoft's prepared COM wrapper, which is called dsofile.dll.
Note that while dsofile is intended for office documents, it does indeed work on any file - including .exe files - you are just stuck with the pre-defined property names. Why not throw your customer id into something like the .Comments property. Just do it in such a way that you can parse it out again.
Here's a sample:
var doc = new OleDocumentPropertiesClass();
doc.Open(pathToFile);
doc.SummaryProperties.Comments = "joe#test.com";
doc.Save();
Of course, you need to first copy it to a temp location, and some time after the user downloads it you'll want to delete it.
You can bundle dsofile.dll with your application and register it as a dependancy and use it in your installer to read the property back out. Or if you can p/invoke the IPropertyStorage without it, then you won't have the dependancy.
The other thing to look into would be using the extended file properties that are read by the Shell32.dll. I just haven't been able to find a clean way to write them easily. If you go this route, please share how you wrote the properties to your .exe.
Have a look whether InPlaceHostingManager class can help you in this case. It won't probably do exactly what you have asked for. But may be able to help...
Any ClickOnce application based on an .exe file can be silently
installed and updated by a custom installer. A custom installer can
implement custom user experience during installation, including custom
dialog boxes for security and maintenance operations. To perform
installation operations, the custom installer uses the
InPlaceHostingManager class.
Walkthrough: Creating a Custom Installer for a ClickOnce Application
EDIT
I am not sure whether you could achieve what you want exactly in the way that you have described in the question. Check whether these threads help you.
Accessing Local and Remote Data in ClickOnce Applications
How to include custom data files in ClickOnce deployment?
How to: Retrieve Query String Information in an Online ClickOnce Application
How would you imagine to "rewrite" setup.exe at download? if instead of opening your application with the provided link (url) users are downloading the file locally directly from the network share, you can't intercept this.
I would try to play with permissions and have the users to execute it from the link provided to them, but unable to connect directly to the share or web address and download it. Not sure this is possible anyway.
You can try embedding that information as a resource into the exe.
Here's a c++ example of updating a resource of an exe. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms648008(v=vs.85).aspx#_win32_Updating_Resources
You should combine approach by Charith and Josh - essentially, configure your web server so that you can generate a new setup based on URL parameters. Use custom installer to read from the referral information from resource for setup.exe. Check this link for how to manipulate resources for a native application in C# - you have to write to resource file while generating setup and need to read it from your custom installer.
Yet another way of generating custom setup would be to build your executable or helper assemblt from command line embedding the necessary information. And then build the setup from command line tools (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xc3tc5xx.aspx). It appears to be quite cumbersome and will take long time to generate the custom setup as opposed to modifying the resource of already built setup.
A completely different approach would be to email the unique referral code (registration code) whenever user downloads the application. In the setup (or application), use custom installer to prompt user for this code. If the setup is invoked via URL then the code will be available from there and in such case Custom Installer need not ask for the code. The email that you send when user download the setup should inform user to preseve the code into some text file along with the setup file.
Related
I would like to build a simple .NET application that installs on a windows machine which will allow the end user to open a command prompt and type "google test" which will open google and search for test. But I'm not sure how to install a global "keyword" such as "google". Is this down via Environment variables? How does this link up to my .NET application?
Any advice or pointers is appreciated.
Thanks
This is beyond a .NET application and belongs into the Area of Setup programms. Visual Studio used to have a Installer Project, but as there are so many 3rd party ways this was removed.
Having "google test" parsed as a google search for "test" is tricky, but possible. However it depends entirely on how the commandline is parsed in a Windows. Wich is pretty much the way it was parsed since DOS 1.0.
If you just enter a word like "google", the commandline will look if there is a Excetuable file (.exe, .com, .bat) of that name in the current folder (working directory). It will then look into all the folders defined in the path variables. However using path variables is so dated, I could find only a single entry in my Windows Path variable now. And it is for MS backward compatibility: "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps;"
Most starting of programms is done via file associations with a specific type. And protocoll associations with a protocoll (like http, https, steam). Indeed my advise would be to make a .NET Programm named "google" whose sole purpose is to to format the proper URL, then send it to console parsing via ProcessStart. And let Windows solve wich programm to use from there.
Edit: And as I only realized after wirting this, apparently Windwos finally supports commandline aliases. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/console/console-aliases
Apparently they even added a way to make them via the WinAPI in Windows 2000. However that requires moving to unmanaged code. And I have no experience, but it appears those aliases might only be valid for one console instance. So you might have to put it into a place like hte autoexec.bat to be called everytime a console is created.
I have a webpage that offers an installer which adds an registry into user's computer based on the clients that the user has access to.
The installer is quite simple. It reads from its app.config, gets the client key and downloads configuration file that is used to create the registry.
Here is the thing, I use ClickOnce to deploy the app. The main logic of the installer remains the same, the only different thing is the app.config key. If the user has 5 clients, I have to publish 5 times since I separate different installers by setting different publish/install urls like below. BTW, I will have to define different Assembly Name too:
It's definitely not a good solution.
Is there any better ways that I can configure the installer to accept this parameter from the webpage, or other better ways to automate this process and then reduce the publish times?
Looking forward to any suggestions!
Thanks!
What I finally done is to write a powershell script, modify related parameters in csproj and deploy them. But I failed to copy those deployed files to remote server(aws). If anyone has any experience on that, you're more than welcome to share your thoughts!
I am working on one desktop application which is built by using .net WPF. I have some data inside the application like images,videos..
I want to make this folder secure, so nobody can access the data inside the folder after application installation. Only the application can read the data from that directory.
Even though administrator of that machine can not open that folder to check the content.
Is it possible to have this kind of security inside the WPF application.
Only motive it to keep the sensitive data protected from external copy from the application users.
Thanks,
Vijay
It depends on how you use the resources.
Actually you could encrypt all "protected" files, so that after the installation every one can copy but no one can use them unless your application decrypts the files.
When you encrypt files you should definitively test the performance (decryption takes some time).
Two links showing how you could do it:
What's the easiest way to encrypt a file in c#?
http://lukhezo.com/2011/11/06/encrypting-files-in-net-using-the-advanced-encryption-standard-aes/
Add the file you would like to strongly protect to you solution. Then right click each file, go to properties and set its "build action" to "embedded resource".
And for how to access the resource stream from within the exe for use with in your application, see link below
How to compile all files to one exe?
That way, your private files will not be copied to the installation folder but will instead reside inside your .exe file.
WPF is beside the point. Applications run with the permissions of the users that start them. If an application needs access to files, then the user will also need rights to those files.
In short, the answer is no, you cannot do exactly what you are asking.
The best you will be able to do is make it hard for a user to discover where the assets are coming from, but you will never be able to give access to your application without giving access to the application's user.
I have a basic installer with an option to install for all users or only for the current user. Based on this selection I copy several files in the common app data or the local app data.
My question is, how do I let my application know where have these files been installed. And I don't mean providing a hard coded path but more like providing the ability to choose between Environment.SpecialFolder.LocalApplicationData (Single User) and Environment.SpecialFolder.CommonApplicationData (All Users).
You should send the ALLUSERS custom action data to a installer class using the installer Custom Actions.
Here is a great custom action installer example that uses Regasm to register .NET assemblies.
Once you have your installer custom action and custom action data - you can store it somewhere where your application can retrieve it - either in the registry, application config, or to a fixed location on disk.
An easy way to figure out which folder your data is in from your application is to check the LocalApplicationData, and if something is there, use it, else check the CommonApplicationData folder.
So I've created a simple msi-setup for my application using a setup project and added a couple of custom actions that take care of stuff like extracting files from archives. Now, there are two extra files in my program files -directory which means that the MSI won't remove the directory at the uninstall by itself. My solution to this was to create a custom action that removes the rest of the files.
Now this works just fine and dandy, as long as the default directory is used at installation. But what if the user chooses to change it? I'd assume there has to be a very simple way to read the directory at the custom action, but I'm not quite sure what that is.
As far as I've found out by googling, there are properties such as TARGETDIR related to the MSI-package. However, some sites also say that I should be setting this property by myself, at the installation stage.
All this has left me quite confused. Basically I see two ways to resolve this:
1) Make sure the application does not create files by itself, and the MSI will take care of it. This would mean a bit more work because I'm not responsible for those extra files.
2) Find out the installation directory at the custom action while uninstalling the application, and remove the last bits by myself. This is the quick-and-dirty way as I see it, and would definitely suffice for now. But how to accomplish this?
Also while I'm here I might as well ask this one more related question. As I mentioned earlier, I extract some files at the install. Now, I'd like to get rid of these archives once I've extracted them. The problem is, if I do this, MSI will think my installation is broken and copy them back each time I launch the application. So how to avoid this?
There is no need to use a custom action to remove the files. MSI has built in support for this scenario in two steps:
Use a search to locate the files you want to remove. Here is a tutorial
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa371564(VS.85).aspx
Then you can schedule a file removal operation to actually delete the files.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa371201(VS.85).aspx
Regarding your second question:
Don't add the archives to the File table. Instead create some self extracting archives and use binary custom actions to unpack them.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368085(VS.85).aspx