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

Question

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 dev

Answer 1

For a more powerful solution, you may want to look at Google Omaha. It's what Chrome uses. You can get both in-app and automatic updates in the background when your application isn't running.

Answer 2

You even can not to develop an external application but implement it as your application's module, e.g. into namespace Update, and use dynamic assembly builder to generate an exe, start it and exit app main, start it again when update will be finished.

Some more info.

Answer 3

There is also DDay update which is open source and is used by one of my customers. We/they are primarily interested in it in the context of a windows service at it works reasonably well for that.

Answer 4

You can try Autoupdater.NET from GitHub I developed it my self and it works very well in my applications. You just have to add one line in your code and it's done. Also, it is open source so you can modify and use as you want.

Answer 5

Should've updated this ages ago, oops!

But anyway, I've been using SparkleDotNET for a while now and it's been working absolutely wonderfully. There's a few little bugs here and there but I've already helped get some of them squashed, and hopefully I'll be able to get rid of the others too :)

For those who have the time to run the publish functionality of Visual Studio, and whose app is relatively self-contained, and doesn't require anything like launching on startup, I'd recommend ClickOnce for sure. MetroTwit uses it and it's got a nice in-app updater interface, so it seems flexible (at least to a certain degree). For launching on startup, it's possible to do so, but methods to do so are quite hacky and don't work that well.

Answer 6

all guys are right specially look at the abatishchev reply.but i think some thing other need that guy forgot it. try to develop your project "modular".put them your code in class library as you can.so during the fix operation replace one of them.think a bout database fix.some time you need to add a column to your database table.what do you do for these cases?

a have developed an update project.in that , i have three kind of fixes. 1- BUG in program operation and need to replace a DDL file 2- Bug in program and need to update currently program executive file 3- bug or change the database and need to execute a sql server query

in a table on web host i put the version history and every time that my app start check for new version.if any update exist check for its type and download it and do the suitable action depend on the update kind and parameters

good luck dude