This is completely insane. Someone from Romania emailed me about selecting an icon file for a ClickOnce deployment so that the application icon is used for the installation and for the shortcut.

He had tried my hack that I have blogged about, written about in CoDe Magazine and shown in conference presentations. The hack requires manual editing of the manifest file and I learned it in the forums.

I had never been able to discover any other way to do it.

There is a new version of the MAGEUI tool, the UI for building ClickOnce manifests, so I went in to see if there was anything different with respect to that.

On the file page, things looked the same as always:

So I was staring at it and looking at the file type column and wishing I could use it. But it’s always appeared to be disabled. While I was staring and thinking, I was clicking on that and on the second click, a drop down list appeared.

And when I clicked the arrow, there it was!

Understand, that in a normal UI property sheet like this, the arrow would be visible when you first click the cell.

So I went back to the previous version of MAGEUI and after two clicks, no dropdown. But guess what, one more click and there it was!

All this time? All of the blog posts I wrote, the article in CoDe Magazine. Nobody every emailed me to tell me “oh, here’s how”. You’d think…  Clearly it’s not THAT obvious! Oh well.

I haven’t ever seen this documented (though I sure wish there was a copy of Brian Noyes ClickOnce book nearby to see if he knew).

Well, there you have it.

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