.Net8 ClickOnce app HARD crashes when launched with arguments.

[MrFJ]

Description

I’m trying to launch an offline WPF ClickOnce app from another app, with launch parameters. After trying many different solutions, I think I’ve found a solution, except I’ve run into an issue: The app crashes as soon as I launch it, just after checking for new version, before even getting into the code. No exceptions, no logs, no windows event log. As far as I can tell this way of launching the app would have worked at least in .Net Framework, but perhaps even in .Net 6 (Sources are unclear)

Configuration

.Net 8
Windows 10, Visual Studio 2022
Any architecture.

Regression?

Sources on the internet claim it worked in .Net framework. Whether it worked in .Net 5 or .Net 6 is unclear to me.

Other information

To replicate the issue, create a new WPF click once app in .Net 8 (Or .Net 7). Publish it to a network drive. Install it, then try to launch it from a command prompt using the following command:
“%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs[PUBLISHERNAME][APPNAME].appref-ms” test

More info on journey with this issue: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77859562/clickonce-net7-wpf-app-why-is-activationuri-null

[NikolaMilosavljevic]

[Triage] @NikolaMilosavljevic please investigate.

[FFPJKamstrup]

I found a "Fix": Deleting the hidden .vs folder fixed the issue. It returns once in a while and I have to delete the .vs folder again before publishing. It's weird, but it works. I wish I knew why...

[chhaugen]

I found that setting "TrustUrlParameters" to "True" makes it so that it hard crashes. Set to "False", it works fine :)

[nas-rda]

@NikolaMilosavljevic I found that this is may be happening on

deployment-tools/src/clickonce/launcher/Program.cs

Line 145 in cfb4036

Environment.SetEnvironmentVariable("ClickOnce_ActivationUri", ad.ActivationUri?.ToString());

. Although there's a conditional access on ActivationUri, an exception is being thrown because the underlying System.Deployment.ApplicationDeployment.ActivationUri tries to create a Uri with the default constructor which will thrown an exception for anything that isn't an absolute URI. This can be seen by setting up logging and getting the following error:
*** Error: Invalid URI: The format of the URI could not be determined.

Since the mentioned line throws an exception, the application will not launch. Maybe that line just needs to be in a try/catch to allow the rest of the method to flow & allow the application to launch.