Am I the only person who thinks that ClickOnce is a piece of crap?

I think overall ClickOnce is "good enough" but definately there are areas for improvement. I understand that it does not allow you to change config files since it creates a hash with all the files included in publish. Once thing you can do is to remove the app.config from the Application files and add manually. And as far as copying files around goes you can setup a frontpage extension at the web server have a login and publish directly to it. It will save the copying process.

I have

Check out Mage/MageUI.. They might help...

http://coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com/2006/04/mageui-can-be-your-clickonce-stage-to.html

It amazes me that you can not add existing files to the list of Application Files that get deployed. For example, one of my cab modules contains an xslt that needs deployed, so I was forced to add a linked file in my main executable project.

It's great for rapid/agile development and deployment into UAT, but useless for production deployment & configuration management. No-one wants to open up VS and republish just to change a config file setting - it's no better than hardcoding settings as constants within the assembly.

Perhaps a clickonce admin tool (or a clickonce setup project) would be the answer - something much simpler than mageUI that even our admins could use.

You might find this helpful: http://blog.gatosoft.com/PermaLink,guid,d0a0dd1e-c9ac-4fa9-a408-615454d49702.aspx