WinForm Download

Chris Sells article in July MSDN about automatic downloading of WinForms from intranet.

How to make it work when network connection is down:

• Hit URL when network is alive. This puts exe and supporting DLL assemblies in download cache. ( gacutil /ldl to display)
  
• Open IE and put in offline mode ( File | Work Offline )
  
• Hit the URL again. App should run from download cache.
  

Note: this does not work for some reason when hitting a URL on the local machine (localhost or machinename).

Roundtrips for Supporting Files

See the article for hints on reducing round-trips. By default, runtime will go back to server ~35 times to locate resources for the app. You can shorten the trips by embedding resources in the exe itself - put attribute on assembly saying the resources are of a certain culture.

Also weird about foo.exe.config - no matter if it's a newer version, it will never get updated past first version! What to do about this?