I was configuring automated builds with CruiseControl.Net which went relatively good until publishing ClickOnce applications. Since I didn’t have Visual Studio installed on the development machine, I was getting the error:

error MSB3147: Could not find required file 'setup.bin' in 'ProjectFolder\Engine'

After searching for the answer for hours online, this article showed me the solution. It was in with some other office building stuff, so I am going to highlight the actual ClickOnce steps.

1. Copy the bootstrapper files from Visual Studio to the same directory on the build server ‘Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0a\Bootstrapper’
2. Create a registry setting to point to the location:
   Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\GenericBootstrapper\3.5\
   Value: Path
   Type: REG_SZ
   Data: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0a\Bootstrapper\

Hope this helps. Thank you Rinat Abdullin for the solution.

CruiseControl.Net cruisecontrol.net, clickonce