How NOT to do single assembly deployment.

I applaud this guys enthusiasm, however, his discovery/technique is something I would strongly urge you to avoid. There are two major reasons for this:

• Doesn’t work as a “regular user”.
• Will cause you MAJOR support issues as Windows Vista gains momentum. See reason #1.

I’ve been using a similar technique in XboxFriends in order to handle automatic update from a single assembly deployment. So for those wondering how this was working, Ralf’s post should give you a starting point. However, as I just stated, I would recommend strongly that you do not utilize this method as it WON’T WORK using the default installation settings (meaning the majority of the install base) of Windows Vista. When UAC (User Account Control) is active, even the administrator account is running as a “regular user”. When something needs elevated privileges, the application will prompt the user (even when your an administrator) to ask for permission for the activity to continue. Since writing to the Program Files folder requires administrator level, you can start to see the problem. Sure, you could just tell your users to copy the file into their C:\Users\[name of user]\Documents folder and run it from there. Yeah, that wouldn’t make life more difficult, would it? ;-)