I just found out that there is a minimal unmanaged API for ClickOnce applications in windows that is located in dfshim.dll. Unfortunately I could only find a very incomplete documentation on MSDN:
There are only very few references in the web. All of them are using the DLL by executing command lines to call the DLL's functions using rundll32.exe.
I would like to call the DLL's functions from C++ code. I did not find a header file to include or a stub-file to link.
I could explicitely load the DLL during runtime and resolve the function symbols manually but that seems pretty uncommon for a Windows API. Also I would need to guess the signature for many of the functions.
How can I use that DLL with Visual Studio 2013? Why is there no include file? Is this actually an official/public API?
1 Answer
Strange, this code is hardly documented.
we ended up in this code:
bool LaunchClickOnceApplication(LPCSTR pszApplication)
{
HRESULT hr(-1);
HINSTANCE hInst = ::LoadLibrary("dfshim.dll");
if ( hInst )
{ typedef HRESULT (WINAPI *dfshim_LaunchApplicationProc) (LPCWSTR pszApplication, LPVOID pData, DWORD dwFlags); dfshim_LaunchApplicationProc fnLaunch = (dfshim_LaunchApplicationProc)GetProcAddress(hInst, "LaunchApplication"); if ( fnLaunch ) { hr = fnLaunch(CA2W(pszApplication), NULL, 0); } ::FreeLibrary(hInst); return SUCCEEDED(hr);
}
else
{ DWORD dwErr = ::GetLastError(); char szMsg[128]; _snprintf_s(szMsg, sizeof(szMsg), _TRUNCATE, "Cannot load dfshim.dll: %lu", dwErr); AfxMessageBox(szMsg); return false;
}
}It is kind of unprofessional not to rely on documentation. It it more like a hack, but I don't see an alternative way. This code works for us.
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