Making ClickOnce Updates Mandatory?

Automatic Updates

Choosing a ClickOnce Update Strategy (Making Updates Required)

One options is to set up automatic updates to your software and mark them as required by setting the minimum required version in your deployment manifest. You can set this in the properties dialog in Visual Studio, or through configuration with the following tag: <deployment install="true" minimumRequiredVersion="1.0.0.0">. The minimum required version checks the version of your assembly, and if it is not at least what you specify here it will force an update.

Programmatic Updates

How to: Add On-Demand Programmatic Update

Another option that will allow you more control of when and how often the update occurs is to do the updates programmatically. You can use the ClickOnce API to check for any updates on the deployment server and install them once your application has been run. You can have far more control over what updates should be installed, how they are installed, and how you notify the user of the updates. If your application is generally a long running instance, you could also set up timers to run in the background every so often to do the updates as well.

Here is an example implementation that polls on an interval: Example.

You can also combine the above two update methods.

The "Auto Update Project's Minimum Required ClickOnce Version" project has a nuget package that updates the ClickOnce settings for you.

https://aupmrcov.codeplex.com/ [ archived ]

GitHub:

https://github.com/deadlydog/AutoUpdateProjectsMinimumRequiredClickOnceVersion

Nuget:

https://www.nuget.org/packages/AutoUpdateProjectsMinimumRequiredClickOnceVersion

Simply you can achieve by adding below <target> tag in your project's .csproj file.

<Project ToolsVersion="14.0" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">

    // Other Tags ...

    <Target Name="AutoSetMinimumRequiredVersion" BeforeTargets="GenerateDeploymentManifest">
        <FormatVersion Version="$(ApplicationVersion)" Revision="$(ApplicationRevision)">
            <Output PropertyName="MinimumRequiredVersion" TaskParameter="OutputVersion" />
        </FormatVersion>
        <FormatVersion Version="$(ApplicationVersion)" Revision="$(ApplicationRevision)">
            <Output PropertyName="_DeploymentBuiltMinimumRequiredVersion" TaskParameter="OutputVersion" />
        </FormatVersion>
    </Target>

    // Other Tags ...

</Project>

It will automatically make your each publish/update mandatory without doing any extra stuff.