Building ClickOnce Applications with NAnt

Since I don’t like to actually do any work, and would much rather automate everything I’m required to do, I decided to automate a ClickOnce application build, because doing it manually was taking me literally, er, seconds, and this is waaaaaay too much like hard work. So, I naturally turned to NAnt, which is so often the answer to all my deployment questions….The answer came in the form of using NAnt to call MSBuild and pass the publish target, along with the version number. So, this is what you need to do:

Add a property to your nant script containing your build number (you can get this from CruiseControl.Net if you’re using CCNet to do your builds)
<property name=”version.num” value=”1.2.3.4″/>
Then just compile the project using NAnt’s MSBuild task, and call the publish target:

<target name=”publish” >

<msbuild project=”${base.dir}\ClickOnce.vbproj”>

<arg value=”/property:Configuration=Release”/>

<arg value=”/p:ApplicationVersion=${version.num}”/>

<arg value=”/t:publish” />

</msbuild>

</target>

The next thing you need to do is create or update the publish.htm file. What I’ve done for this is to take a copy of a previously generated publish.htm, and replace the occurrences of the application name with a token. Then in the NAnt script, I replace the token with the relevant application name with a version number. I do this because the version number will change with each build, and rather than manually update it, which is much too complicated for me, I’d rather just automate it so that I can go back to sleep while it builds.I tokenised the application name because of a much darker, more sinister reason that I’ll maybe explain at another time, but the world’s just not ready for that yet.
Anyway, here’s all that in NAntish:

<copy todir=”${config.dir}\${project.name}”>

<fileset basedir=”.”>

<include name=”publish.htm” />

</fileset>

<filterchain>

<replacetokens>

<token key=”VERSION” value=”${version.num}” />

<token key=”APPNAME” value=”${appname}” />

</replacetokens>

</filterchain>

</copy>