Re: Uninstall of ClickOnce app - unattended or programmatic?

Hi,

The ClickOnce technology seems flawed to me, but to take up the point about security there are two considerations:

1. If user has purchased application 'X' over the internet and vendor decides to blackmail all users after three months - "give us more money or we'll disable your app", then it's correct the user has the choice of when the app is uninstalled, but since vendor can put a check where the app contacts home over the internet each time it's run to get a validation key, the vendor could trash it anyway...

2. If we're talking applications for corporate LANs, then the network Admin MUST MUST MUST be able to install and uninstall all apps to and from all machines without any restrictions. Imagine if the latest Sun Java had a major security flaw and Sun didn't fix it quickly, the corporate admin would need a quick way to uninstall it from all machines. If ClickOnce can't do this in a corporate environment then it's NO USE in a corporate environment...

Wei-Dong XU [MS] wrote:

Hi Stan,

Thanks for the posting!

"...Short of using an enterprise management system..."
I understand your requiremenet very well. However, based on my research, the uninstallation is kept for the client box administrator (or the daily user) for each application. This is to say, the uninstallation decision to one application should be handled by the user manually which is one design considering the security. If one Enterprise level controlling system provides this feature, it apparently opens a very weak attack point for the malicious code. Some dangerous script and code may remove one specified appliction from the whole domain. This will be one nightmare for the users and the domain admin.

So for the clickonce application. this uninstallation feature is not provided and the user should manually uninstall the application if he don't want to use then.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any further question on this issue.

Have a nice day!

Best Regards,
Wei-Dong Xu
Microsoft Online Partner Support
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