Looking for recomendation to show release notes in ClickOnce applications

Question

I have a few strategies which I'm about to trial in a few scenarios and am looking for guidance on what others have had experience with and proven successful.

The current strategies I have in mind are:

• Place a release-notes.xml file in the root of the publish location which contains formatted notes that the application can manually download when it detects a new version available.
• Use a FileGroup and download that group using ApplicationDeployment.DownloadFileGroup(String) which would contain the said release notes.

I only want the release notes prior an update. I'm handling application updates myself through ApplicationDeployment.CheckForUpdateAsync and notifying the user through the application status bar and was thinking of allowing them to view what has changed prior to initiating the application update.

Any other suggestions are very much welcome.

I should make it clear that the use case for the release notes are prior to an update to allow the user to determine if they should choose to update at that time or not.

Answer 1

What you are suggesting sounds plausible. However, I would try keep it as simple as possible...

• An HTML file of the release notes published to your web server.
• Show the users the release notes through their browser... System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(relaseNotesUrl);

Answer 2

I agree with codeConcussion. You can also use ApplicationDeployment.IsFirstRun to tell if the user has installed a new version. It's true after an update or after the 1st installation. But since you're doing the updates programmatically, you can probably just pop up the web browser at that point.