Publishing Your App For Desktop

Preparing For Publish

Publish Using Visual Studio 2022

In the debugger toolbar drop-down, select the net8.0-desktop target framework
Once the project has reloaded, right-click on the project and select Publish
Select the Folder target for your publication then click Next
Select the Folder target again then Next
Choose an output folder then click Finish
The profile is created, you can now Close the dialog
In the opened editor, click Show all settings
Set Configuration to Release
Set Target framework to net8.0-desktop
You can set Deployment mode to either Framework-dependent or Self-contained
- If Self-contained is chosen and you're targeting Windows, Target runtime must match the installed .NET SDK runtime identifier as cross-publishing self-contained WPF apps (e.g. win-x64 to win-arm64) is not supported for now.
You can set Target runtime, make sure it honors the above limitation, if it applies.
Click Save
Click Publish

Publish Using The CLI

On Windows/macOS/Linux, open a terminal in your csproj folder and run:

dotnet publish -f net8.0-desktop

If you wish to do a self-contained publish, run the following instead:

dotnet publish -f net8.0-desktop -r {{RID}} -p:SelfContained=true

Where {{RID}} specifies the chosen OS and Architecture (e.g. win-x64). When targeting Windows, cross-publishing to architectures other than the currently running one is not supported.

Windows ClickOnce

Uno Platform supports publishing desktop apps using ClickOnce to Windows environments.

In order to do so, you'll need to create a .pubxml file using Visual Studio, or to use the file below:

Using a Sample Profile
Using the Wizard

Create a file named Properties\PublishProfiles\ClickOnceProfile.pubxml in your project with the following contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=208121. -->
<Project>
  <PropertyGroup>
    <ApplicationRevision>0</ApplicationRevision>
    <ApplicationVersion>1.0.0.*</ApplicationVersion>
    <BootstrapperEnabled>True</BootstrapperEnabled>
    <Configuration>Release</Configuration>
    <CreateWebPageOnPublish>False</CreateWebPageOnPublish>
    <GenerateManifests>true</GenerateManifests>
    <Install>True</Install>
    <InstallFrom>Disk</InstallFrom>
    <IsRevisionIncremented>True</IsRevisionIncremented>
    <IsWebBootstrapper>False</IsWebBootstrapper>
    <MapFileExtensions>True</MapFileExtensions>
    <OpenBrowserOnPublish>False</OpenBrowserOnPublish>
    <Platform>x64</Platform>
    <PublishProtocol>ClickOnce</PublishProtocol>
    <PublishReadyToRun>False</PublishReadyToRun>
    <PublishSingleFile>False</PublishSingleFile>
    <RuntimeIdentifier>win-x64</RuntimeIdentifier>
    <SelfContained>True</SelfContained>
    <SignatureAlgorithm>(none)</SignatureAlgorithm>
    <SignManifests>False</SignManifests>
    <SkipPublishVerification>false</SkipPublishVerification>
    <TargetFramework>net8.0-desktop</TargetFramework>
    <UpdateEnabled>False</UpdateEnabled>
    <UpdateMode>Foreground</UpdateMode>
    <UpdateRequired>False</UpdateRequired>
    <WebPageFileName>Publish.html</WebPageFileName>

    <!-- Those two lines below need to be removed when building using "UnoClickOncePublishDir" -->
    <PublishDir>bin\Release\net8.0-desktop\win-x64\app.publish\</PublishDir>
    <PublishUrl>bin\publish\</PublishUrl>
  </PropertyGroup>
  <ItemGroup>
    <!-- This section needs to be adjusted based on the target framework -->
    <BootstrapperPackage Include="Microsoft.NetCore.DesktopRuntime.8.0.x64">
      <Install>true</Install>
      <ProductName>.NET Desktop Runtime 8.0.10 (x64)</ProductName>
    </BootstrapperPackage>
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

Note

An existing Visual Studio issue prevents the Publish context menu from being active if iOS/Android/maccatalyst are present in the TargetFrameworks list. In order to create the file, you can temporarily remove those target frameworks from TargetFrameworks in order to create the .pubxml file generated.

To use the Visual Studio publishing wizard:

Select the netX.0-desktop target framework in the debugger drop-down
In the Solution Explorer, right click on your project then select Publish
Click the + New profile button
Select ClickOnce, then Next
Configure your app publishing in all the following wizard pages
In the Configuration section, make sure to select Portable for the Target runtime
Click Finish.

The Properties\PublishProfiles\ClickOnceProfile.pubxml file will be created.

Once done, you can use the following command in your CI environment, or using a Developer Command Prompt for Visual Studio:

msbuild /m /r /target:Publish /p:Configuration=Release /p:PublishProfile="Properties\PublishProfiles\ClickOnceProfile.pubxml" /p:TargetFramework=net8.0-desktop

The resulting package will be located in the bin\publish folder. You can change the output folder using /p:UnoClickOncePublishDir=your\output\directory.

Depending on your deployment settings, you can run the Setup.exe file to install the application on a machine.

Important

At this time, publishing with the Visual Studio Publishing Wizard is not supported for multi-targeted projects. Using the command line above is required.