ClickOnce: Beyond The Basics

I went to this session to finally find out more information about ClickOnce, I had kept hearing about it at previous TechEds but never used it. A few weeks back I wanted to use it for a project but oddly enough didn’t find out very much information on it. I thought it was supposed to be integrated with Visual Studio. As it turns out it’s the “Publish” method in Visual Studio.

ClickOnce allows .NET applications to be deployed via a web browser. Application will be installed into the user’s local app directory (Document Settings\Local Settings) and once installed into a folder that is created, can’t access any files outside of its sandboxed directory.

Security access is controlled but the .NET Code Access Security. This is the security model that defines certain permissions based on the browsers internet zone. However, most useful application need to be given Full Trust to access resources.

Some of the requirements include needing to sign the assemblies (we already have a certificate for this), if group policy is set to allow full trust to application with our certificate we can pretty much avoid any tricky application security issues. Deploying applications via ClickOnce also builds in an ability to provide “web based update” capabilities. Checking for updates is supported in a variety of ways, and when one if found you can force the user to download it before they run the application. Another benefit is the application is cached/installed on a per user basis. So you can install it for one user on the machine.

Putting It Together: Moving Beyond the Basics of SQL Server 2005 Integration Services

This was probably one of the most beneficial sessions I attended while at TechEd, fitting that it’s my last session of TechEd. After leaving this session  I think it would be a good idea to set aside a bit of time so that I can re-write the SSIS employee import from scratch. This will be especially important as we look to accommodating changes for the HRIS project. While I knew that package modularization would be good, I hadn’t quite seen how that would fit into our import. This session cleared that picture up and I can now see a much better implementation that would address the issues of the old DTS as well as the new ones we’ve uncovered with the first version. Being the first SSIS package, I knew that it would not be written optimally. I think HRIS would be a good opportunity to refactor and redesign the import, this would also be the same type of design we would use for the W50 import.

For anyone planning on doing SSIS, after you’ve started writing packages and understand SSIS programming this would be a good session to watch on the DVD. I would not however recommend watching it until AFTER you have already become familiar as this was pretty advanced SSIS information and would be way more confusing than beneficial. Experiencing the “quirks” of how the new Data Flow works is necessary for understanding the benefits of the design guidelines that were presented. This is where you need to throw out the old DTS mentality and adopt the SSIS data process.

Conclusion:

With that my TechEd blog series comes to an end. Overall this conference had some pluses and minus. Seems organization was down this year, planning didn’t seem as good. The food was defiantly a minus this year, lunch was editable at best most of the time a real disappointment from previous years. Traffic is Boston seems to be really bad at time, but by mid week drivers seemed to have figure it out, or they replaced the old ones, not really sure. They had some very “interesting” tactics that I can’t say I know for sure were quicker, they defiantly weren’t the shortest route, but I don’t remember sitting in mindless traffic either.

One of the pluses that really surprised me was the concert at Fenway. While the lines for food were very long, and there was way too much Budweiser and I never found the Coors I heard spoke of, the Train performance was off the hook. Fenway Franks were excellent as well, I guess this night there was no need for anything fancy. Most of the sessions were good although it seemed much lighter on the development offerings. I found myself going to more SharePoint sessions that I had planned for which made me miss out on some other stuff. SharePoint has come back for 2007 with a really strong product addressing MANY of the pain points of the version 2 product. I think it’s a serious option to consider for projects moving forward and I look forward to playing with the beta version.