What's the best way for a .NET winforms application to update itself without using ClickOnce?

Question

For technical reasons, I can\'t use ClickOnce to auto-update my .NET application and its assemblies. What is the best way to handle auto-updating in .NET?

Answer 1

Indigo Rose has a product called TrueUpdate that also does this for you. I have used them in the past from both managed and unmanaged apps. It is basically a file you put on your server (http, ftp, whatever you like). Then you call a client side EXE to check for updates. The updates file is pulled and has logic to detect what version is on the client (your choice, DLL detection, registry key reads, etc). Then it will find the appropriate updater for it and download the file for execution. It works well through proxies as well.

The only thing they don't do is actually build the patches for you. You have to do that manually, or with another product they have. It is a commcerial solution and works quite well though if you need it.