How do I offer automatic updates for my program in Visual Basic 2008?

Question

How do I set up automatic updates for my program in Visual Basic 2008?

I would like the user to be able install the program from a setup.exe file then run the auto update function within the program. How do I do this in Visual Basic 2008?

Answer 1

Assuming that you are writing a client application, ClickOnce is probably the best/easiest way to go.

Answer 2

If you don't go the ClickOnce option, then you'll probably end up tooling it yourself.

One of the considerations will be that the calling client has access to the update server -- undoubtedly over the web. HTTP calls on port 80 or HTTPS on port 443 are typically allowed through firewalls. That's probably a good place to start for your medium.

I've deployed a project which does this sort of thing by performing a call to a web service to determine if an update is available. The web service looks at a directory on our web server and examines a convention we have for a named zip file. The calling client makes a determination based on the versioning of whether an update is available.

If an update is available, the app spawns an executable that does the downloading (in my case it unzips as well), then re-launches the main entry point to the app and exits the updater. Using a separate executable in a spawing/shelling manner allows you to update the main trunk of the app, but you get into trickiness where it's cumbersome to update the update executable.

It's not as graceful as ClickOnce, but it's worked well for me. I haven't used ClickOnce, so I'm not aware of whether it has shortcomings in terms of user profile isolation.

Answer 3

You'll have to roll your own or use ClickOnce.

Here's Microsoft documentation on using ClickOnce's update mechanism.