Auto update .NET applications

.net auto-update
Aleksandar Vucetic picture Aleksandar Vucetic · May 4, 2009 · Viewed 93.2k times · Source

We are in a process of developing a really complex system consisting of several WCF services, ASP.NET MVC applications, administration tools (Windows Forms apps)... Some of those, will have instances running on several servers. We are looking for a good auto update solution for such a system. Most likely, we would need a separate auto update application (service) that will do the job, or some centralized admin application that will know about versions of all installed instances and do the update remotely. Is there any good product/library, made for this purpose, that you know about or had experience with?

Answer

dr. evil picture dr. evil · May 4, 2009

Personally I'm using a very simple methodology for any kind of auto-update:

  • Have an installer
  • Check the new version (simple WebClient and compare numbers with your current AssemblyVersion)
  • If the version is higher download the latest installer (should be over SSL for security reasons)
  • Run the downloaded installer and close the application. (in this stage you need to have admin privileges if your installer requires you to be an admin)

The installer should take care of the rest. This way you'll always have the latest version and an installer with a latest version.

Related questions

Auto-update library for .NET?

On the Mac there's a really nice library called Sparkle that programs can use to implement the checking/install functionality for auto-updates. Is there anything similar out there for .NET? Or just regular Win32?

Read More
Free solution for automatic updates with a .NET/C# app?

From searching I can see this has been asked time and time again, but not adequately enough, so here goes. I'm a hobbyist developer with no budget. A program I've been developing has been in need of regular bugfixes, and …

Read More
Writing my own Auto Updater

When writing my own auto updater, is there a general framework that I should be following? A while ago I was reading up on how one should create a 'boot strapper' that will load first before the main application (since …

Read More