Today I wanted to make a Click-Once-Deployment of an application which uses the Gecko engine via the GeckoFX.dll. For some reason I decided to include the Gecko-Engine-Zip as a resource inside my .exe to unpack it after installation by the program itself. Everything worked just as planned except for my clickonce-downloaded Application - it simply did not work.
After some tries I noticed that it only wont work when started from the start menu rather than from the installation path itself. Then -later- it also worked from the startmenu... very strange...
I'll keep it short this time... so what's happened was that I started the clickonce from Firefox - it has a plugin that supports clickonce. This -like also the click in the startmenü- will start up the dfsvc.exe which then will start the application. The dfsvc.exe itself has a behaviour that it wont be started twice but also terminates after about 15 minutes when idle.
The clou is that Firefox will add its program path to its Process-Enviroments "Path" Variable which then will be inherited to the dfsvc.exe process and also then to my applications process and since firefox places its path at first - the gecko engine tried to pick all its needed dlls from the firefox path rather than the unpacked xulrunner path in my installation directory.
Since I tested very frequently at the beginning I kept the dfsvc.exe with the "wrong" Path-Vars alive and only later after a little idle time a new instance was started by clicking the prog in the startmenü and the pathes then were correct.
So do you still think ClickOnce is cool??