Does Visual Studio ClickOnce deployment automatically include the necessary .NET framework?

Question

When using a ClickOnce installer, will it include the necessary .NET framework?

For instance, I want to distribute a WPF application that uses the System.ComponentModel namespace, which wasn't included until .NET 4.5. If I ran the ClickOnce on an older version of Windows that only had up through, say, .NET 3.0, would it still work?

Answer 1

The click once application will depend on the .NET 4.5 framework. You can include this as a redistributable through project settings -> publish -> prerequisites. In fact I think recent VS versions will already prepare a setup package to run through installing this during the pre-reqs section of your installer. You can even alter the location of where the redistributable package comes from.

In summary. It will "work" in that when someone runs your installer it will tell them they don't have the correct pre-reqs, and offer to install .NET 4.5

Answer 2

It will, if you install with the setup.exe installer. I haven't tried it for some time but it always worked like this.

If you link directly to *.application manifest, the .net framework and other dependencies will not be installed automatically.