Can not use ClickOnce publish on .NET 4.0 application from Visual Studio 2012

Question

I installed Visual Studio 2012 and went to go publish one of our applications, that is targeted at the .NET 4.0 framework. Due to the setup on these machines, we c

Answer 1

I had a similar problem.

The registry key specified in the MSDN documentation http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165429(v=vs.110).aspx pointed to directory c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bootstrapper\ as the packages directory that was incorrect.

Visual Studio 2012 was looking for the packages in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v8.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages directory. At first glance, the packages appeared to be in the packages directory, but only the package folders were there, with the executables missing from each package folder. For example the DotNetFX40Client sub directory was in the packages folder but the file dotNetFx40_Client_x86_x64.exe was missing from the DotNetFX40Client folder.