After a few more hours trying to isolate the issue with deploying via ClickOnce we have a solution, so I’m happy to announce that Sync Tester should be ok to run (note that I have changed this back to just the runnable version, removing the install option for the moment). One of the limitations around SQL Mobile was that it was constrained by the path length that could be used in the connection string. Clearly to support ClickOnce deployment this limitation had to be lifted since by default ClickOnce apps end up in a folder which has a longish path. Unfortunately in RC1 this limitation doesn’t seem to be working properly when the database is used with merge replication. To get around this Sync Tester uses a temporary file name (eg My.Computer.FileSystem.GetTempFileName – although I add “.sdf” so that it is the correct file type).
The other feature that made it into this version (basically cause I got tired of typing each of the values in every time I ran the application) is that it remembers the parameters you enter between sessions. This is easily done by wiring the textboxes up, using the designer, to application settings (user). Note this would have been much harder had it not been for the VB.NET application framework which automatically loads (C# too) and saves (VB.NET only) application settings on application startup/shutdown.