Author Topic: Visual Studio 2012 may mean one-click installs for SGDK2  (Read 6952 times)

bluemonkmn

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Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 is apparently now available, and my understanding is this means that one-click installs should work if I upgrade SGDK2 to use .NET 4.5 now. Do you think folks would appreciate being able to use SGDK2 as a one-click install application? (ClickOnce deployment was available before, but it was buggy when performing automatic updates.)

v6v

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Re: Visual Studio 2012 may mean one-click installs for SGDK2
« Reply #1 on: 2012-08-30, 04:12:50 AM »
Sounds neat.. is this only for installing SGDK2 or does it include the installation of SGDK2 games

I read somewhere that ClickOnce also means that applications can be run without permanent download to the hard drive.

How exactly does this work

bluemonkmn

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Re: Visual Studio 2012 may mean one-click installs for SGDK2
« Reply #2 on: 2012-08-30, 05:09:52 AM »
I was only thinking about ClickOnce installation for the SGDK2 IDE. Hopefully if you really want your game to be playable on a web site, you would just use HTML5 format instead of .NET.

My understanding of ClickOnce is that the program installs into an obscure temporary location on the hard drive like C:\Users\Ben\AppData\Local\Apps\2.0\MVECRWXQ.2H6\DG4ZPB59.D0Q\clic...exe_f84b370c827b5c7a_0001.0002_none_c4007a823033b006

and then if it's still there when you want to run it again, it can just use the local copy. When I was testing ClickOnce with SGDK2, I was even able to get an icon into the start menu, and a file association for SGDK2 files (which is the part that was broken in .NET 4.0 - automatic updates failed if you had a file association), so it's very similar to a normal installation.

v6v

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Re: Visual Studio 2012 may mean one-click installs for SGDK2
« Reply #3 on: 2012-08-30, 07:39:39 PM »
I was only thinking about ClickOnce installation for the SGDK2 IDE. Hopefully if you really want your game to be playable on a web site, you would just use HTML5 format instead of .NET.

My understanding of ClickOnce is that the program installs into an obscure temporary location on the hard drive like C:\Users\Ben\AppData\Local\Apps\2.0\MVECRWXQ.2H6\DG4ZPB59.D0Q\clic...exe_f84b370c827b5c7a_0001.0002_none_c4007a823033b006

and then if it's still there when you want to run it again, it can just use the local copy. When I was testing ClickOnce with SGDK2, I was even able to get an icon into the start menu, and a file association for SGDK2 files (which is the part that was broken in .NET 4.0 - automatic updates failed if you had a file association), so it's very similar to a normal installation.

I'm not tech savvy, but I don't think it should be so much of a difference apart from the start menu installations (It feels nice to see the "NEW Applications Installed" bubble in Windows that highlights newly installed apps. It felt great to install SGDK1 for the first time and see that ("I finally have a program to make video games now!!")

And from what I read, the automatic updates to the SGDK2 IDE.

One thing I really liked was the NSIS installer for SGDK1. But there isn't much need for that anymore.

I don't see any objections. I keep SGDK2 pinned to my taskbar anyways.

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Re: Visual Studio 2012 may mean one-click installs for SGDK2
« Reply #4 on: 2012-09-03, 06:43:18 AM »
I guess it'll be a bit longer before SGDK2 click once installs are available because Visual Studio 2012 doesn't have express editions for desktop available yet -- only for Windows 8 and web.

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Re: Visual Studio 2012 may mean one-click installs for SGDK2
« Reply #5 on: 2012-09-27, 05:11:03 AM »
Well, the desktop version of Visual Studio 2012 Express is out, and I made a trial clickonce installer for SGDK2, and that much works great (better than in .NET 4.0 and Visual C# 2010 Express), but then I noticed that the sample project looked wrong. As it turns out, something is causing the layers to draw in the wrong order (the generated code is hardwired to draw them in the wrong order) when the project is compiled under .NET 4.5. My guess is that something about .NET datasets changed (SGDK2 files are saved .NET datasets) so that the sorting works differently. Anyway, I'll be investigating. I'm just glad it was something as simple as a sort order and not something as painful as alpha blending/translucency stopped working. Making some progress, but life's busy these days, so it's slow progress.