ClickOnce was introduced in Visual Studio 2005 and it's the deployment strategy that you want to use if your requirements are uncomplicated. ClickOnce is both one of the easiest ways to put your work in front of your customers and one of the most powerful. Not only does it deploy your project "from a Web page, from a network file share, or from media such as a CD-ROM" but it also provides an automated way to download updates to the project whenever the solution changes (think: "Windows Update"), creates shortcuts on the customer's machine, and creates add/remove capability through Windows. The automatic ClickOnce updates are "transacted". That means they are either done fully or not at all. It's designed to provide the slickest, quickest user experience possible. And it's available in the VB.NET Express Editions for free. But the concept of "click just once" is from your customer's point of view. As a programmer, there's still quite a bit to do when you use it.
What ClickOnce is not is flexible. If you want flexible, go back to Setup projects. ClickOnce gets it's remarkable simplicity by handling all the messy details internally and you don't have many options to override them. You can decide if you want the project to be online only or both online and offline, you can change the name, and you can change where the project is deployed. That's pretty close to "it" unless you want to start tearing apart Microsoft's system and build your own based on it - not a trivial task but some people have done it.
You won't see ClickOnce anywhere in the Visual Studio menu. To create a ClickOnce deployment, select Publish appname from the Build menu. Visual Studio takes you through a relatively short wizard and creates a bunch of files that do all the work. You don't have to know anything about these files because you won't change them anyway.
It's easy to create a very simple Windows App and then create a ClickOnce deployment. You ought to do it right now.
