Earlier quoted context omitted.
While that's obviously a solution, it's not quite the same y'know? There's a lot more skill overhead in learning that tool vs the comparative ease of the installer project. Considering how thoroughly MS screwed the pooch on ClickOnce, I was genuinely surprised when they completely abandoned their working installer system.
What's wrong with ClickOnce? I've not used it from a developer's perspective, but Chrome's installation (which uses it) always seems smooth as butter.
There's also no ability to publish the built installer outside of the UI- my build scripts had to build the /app.publish directory and then just copy the whole shebang to a network location for deployment. I'm not as upset about this being a separate step, but if they indeed allow you to configure and deploy the installer from within the UI why not expose an API to do it as well?
Overall I think ClickOnce is fine for internal, self-updating tools. It's worth noting, however, that I was inspired to create my workflow based on looking at what Github was doing with their windows client.
[1]: http://whazzing.com/blog/2013/04/11/automated-clickonce-buil...