No. While Visual Studio makes deploying “ClickOnce” applications simple, there are several other ways to deploy “ClickOnce” applications. The .NET Framework SDK includes a tool named MAGE(Manifest Editor & Generator) that provides both a UI (mageui.exe) & cmd line (mage.exe) interface for creating & manipulating the xml manifests that drive “ClickOnce”. Another option is to use the manifest generation MSbuild tasks included in the .NET Framework (this is what VS uses to generate manifests).