I can't believe an company so vested in the enterprise market can do such a terrible job of allowing companies to deploy enterprise software. Click once isn't supported in VS anymore, and was always horrible when it came to things like CI servers anyway. Windows 10 store requires running on azure which make it a no go, doesn't allow push updates anyway. The best options have always been third party ones like chocolatey or NSIS, but they are limited as well, chocolatey does not allow push based and NSIS is pretty weird.
19 years after the first release of apt-get and I'm still waiting for MS to give me something half as good.
Click-Once is like... the smartest idea that ever got built by people who have never worked in places that need something like Click-Once.
I am of the opinion that if they had dropped the "use apps over the web" angle and focused on small-medium-enterprise continuous deployment they woulda had a true game changer on their hands... Click-Once dovetails naturally into something like Apples launchpad, its "turn it off and turn it on again" workflow was ideal for 'Sue in Accounting', its simplified publishing model is great for ISVs with lots of customers, and its sandboxy requirements are a natural fit for the way dotnet core is coming together.
And, yeah, that the Windows ecosystem is still worseoff than apt-get forever ago is a) shocking, b) further proof that Richard Stallman was right about everything ;)
Wix isn’t terrible. We use that for deploying two products. When I say not terrible it hides a lot of the design by committee ugliness of MSI packages.
Have you looked at chocolatey as a total replacement for apt-get? If you havent, be prepared for eye gouging disappointment! :(
