I was thinking of writing a script to check, at login, if the version of out .net program was the same as the one on the server and then install an update, but if there's anything on the net which does such a thing (and has extra bells and whistles) that anyone can recommend, I'd be interested to hear about it.
Is ClickOnce a common choice for commercial software packages?
Eric J.
2009-09-24 18:01:31
.NET isn't a very common choice for commercial packages, so ClickOnce probably doesn't have much usage in that area. However, you don't have to stick with that update dialog from ClickOnce. You can use the ApplicationDeployment class to check for updates and stuff within the app.
tster
2009-09-24 18:09:56
Thanks David.My one concern with ClickOnce is whether there would be negative impacts of changing the deployment strategy, such as rights to certain things that the program does (like integration with a modem).
Tim Almond
2009-09-24 21:06:02
A:
Here's an open-source solution I wrote to address specific needs we had for WinForms and WPF apps. The general idea is to have the greatest flexibility, at the lowest overhead possible.
So, integration is super-easy, and the library does pretty much everything for you, including synchronizing operations. It is also highly flexible, and lets you determine what tasks to execute and on what conditions - you make the rules (or use some that are there already). Last by not least is the support for any updates source (web, BitTorrent, etc) and any feed format - whatever is not implemented you can just write for yourself.
Cold updates (requiring an application restart) is also supported, and done automatically unless "hot-swap" is specified for the task.
This boild down to one DLL, less than 70kb in size.
More details at http://www.code972.com/blog/2010/08/nappupdate-application-auto-update-framework-for-dotnet/
Code is at http://github.com/synhershko/NAppUpdate (Licensed under the Apache 2.0 license)
synhershko
2010-08-24 22:41:40