Announcing 8.0 Preview 1 release

[NikolaMilosavljevic]

Along with .NET 8.0 Preview 1 we have release a preview of dotnet-mage tool: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.DotNet.Mage/8.0.0-preview.1.23115.1

Notable changes are:

• Applications can discover the filename for activation using custom File Association
• Applications can discover arguments used for activation via appref-ms file

Note that this preview of dotnet-mage does not require .NET 8.0 Preview 1 and still runs on .NET 7.0. This will change in future preview releases.

Both changes were implemented with #245

Launcher will now read AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ActivationArguments.ActivationData array and set the appropriate environment variables if array is non-empty.

New environment variables

ClickOnce_ActivationData_Count

If this variable exists, the value is the count of elements in ActivationData string array.

ClickOnce_ActivationData_<n>

For each element in array, new environment variable gets added, with a zero-based index, i.e.:
ClickOnce_ActivationData_0
ClickOnce_ActivationData_1
...

Note that the scenarios being fixed always use the 0-index element, so the variable will always be ClickOnce_ActivationData_0, but the code is flexible and is able to pass all activation data to .NET app.

Usage scenario

Developer can read these environment variables to discover ActivationData content, using something like the following:

string value = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("ClickOnce_ActivationData_0");

Previously, for .NET FX apps, this would have been achieved using the following code:

string value = AppDomain.CurrentDomain?.SetupInformation?.ActivationArguments?.ActivationData?[0];

[MrFJ]

Sorry, I know this discussion is a year old, but I'm wondering how I can set ActivationData when programmatically launching a (Available offline) ClickOnce app via the appref-ms file? I've tried running the process with arguments, but this results in a hard crash.

[pjmagee]

Any guides on how to build and package on a Linux agent? I'm lost.

[NikolaMilosavljevic]

We have some basic documentation at: https://github.com/dotnet/deployment-tools/tree/main/docs/dotnet-mage

More can be found in Microsoft and Visual Studio documentation, i.e:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/deployment/clickonce-security-and-deployment?view=vs-2022
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/deployment/clickonce-deployment-dotnet?view=vs-2022

Note that dotnet-mage is an open-sourced version of the old Mage tool, command line documentation is available at: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/tools/mage-exe-manifest-generation-and-editing-tool

When using dotnet-mage on Linux, manifest signing is not available.

[pjmagee]

Thank you!