Suggest a method for auto-updating my C# program [duplicate]

Answer 1

ClickOnce is a good solution, but if you wish to have total control then you can roll-your-own. I would suggest polling a webservice to find if there are later versions available, downloading required files to a side-by-side directory, and using a launcher (or updating a shortcut) to automatically launch the latest version.

This is a little complicated, but caters for situations where the application may be running, and can therefore not be overwritten.

Answer 2

ClickOnce is perfect for this sort of scenario.

Answer 3

There is this great framework called NetSparkle and also this DotNetUpdater

I haven't used them yet but hope to do so very soon. You can try it out.

Answer 4

Fairly well is not good enough :)

NAppUpdate is an open-source library I wrote to address just this. The general idea is to have the greatest flexibility, at the lowest overhead possible.

So, integration is super-easy, and the library does pretty much everything for you, including synchronizing operations. It is also highly flexible, and lets you determine what tasks to execute and on what conditions - you set the rules. Last by not least is the support for any updates source (web, BitTorrent, etc) and any feed format - whatever is not implemented you can just write by yourself.

Cold updates (requiring an application restart) are also supported, and done automatically unless "hot-swap" is specified for the task.

This all boils down to one DLL, less than 70kb in size.

More details at http://www.code972.com/blog/2010/08/nappupdate-application-auto-update-framework-for-dotnet/

Code is at http://github.com/synhershko/NAppUpdate (Licensed under the Apache 2.0 license)