Automatically checking for a new version of my application

Question

Trying to honor a feature request from our customers, I\'d like that my application, when Internet is available, check on our website if a new version is available.

The

Answer 1

If you want to keep it really basic, simply upload a version.txt to a webserver, that contains an integer version number. Download that check against the latest version.txt you downloaded and then just download the msi or setup package and run it.

More advanced versions would be to use rss, xml or similar. It would be best to use a third-party library to parse the rss and you could include information that is displayed to your user about changes if you wish to do so.

Basically you just need simple download functionality.

Both these solutions will only require you to access port 80 outgoing from the client side. This should normally not require any changes to firewalls or networking (on the client side) and you simply need to have a internet facing web server (web hosting, colocation or your own server - all would work here).

There are a couple of commercial auto-update solutions available. I'll leave the recommendations for those to others answerers, because I only have experience on the .net side with Click-Once and Updater Application Block (the latter is not continued any more).