The Matt Faus Blog

I have been working with ClickOnce a lot recently for work and one thing that comes in real handy when debugging deployment of your application (which takes way more than one click) is the actual location on disk of files that are downloaded from the ClickOnce server to the client machine. I knew that these files were downloaded and being run, but I simply could not find them in Windows Explorer. I tried all kinds of searches using both the indexed and non-indexed versions of Windows Search, but nothing came up. I don’t know why this isn’t more common knowledge, but here we go.

So, the first place you should look is here:
C:\Documents and Settings\_username_\Local Settings\Apps\_DotNet_Version_

However, since ClickOnce applications are not supposed to know where exactly the reside on disk (for a lot of reasons security and deployment considerations), the folder names get obfuscated from here. I would suggest just using the modified dates of the folders and files as clues in your search. Hopefully you don’t have too much stuff thrown in there. Another thought would be to explicitly add this folder to the Desktop Search index list (or maybe remove the explicity exclusion?), so then you could use good ‘ole search on it to find your files.

When I finally found the files I was looking for there were in this folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Apps\2.0\LCN10VZX.HD3\025C2B6R.1XJ\qdab..ient_f1fd3e157083502b_0002.0001_10859e55371bee77

Lame, huh? (and, yes, I know running as Administrator is stupid)