Class to Help Manually Update Your ClickOnce App

Using ApplicationDeployment to manually update ClickOnce applications

"Class to implement manual updates in ClickOnce applications.

With one line of code, you can asynchronously update your applications

Dim updateCO As New UpdateClickOnce("EnGraph Manager", True, True)
 
..."

As you might have guessed, I like using ClickOnce to deploy my .Net 2 apps. I’ve used other "auto-updating" methods in the past, but they have always required more work than I like to implement and keep up.

The one thing I did like about them was that it was pretty easy (once everything else was done) to add a user driven "Check for Update" feature. This lets the user check for and get updates while still in the app (like after getting an email or IM that I’ve just released a new version).

ClickOnce, by default has a check "Before application starts" or "Check for update every # hour/day/week". For my apps, polling is not a good solution (plus I just don’t like the idea of polling). Also it is an either/or option. You can’t both check at startup and poll. So polling is out for me. But I digress...

Extra coding is required to implement manual, user driven "Check for updates" in ClickOnce apps (as is also required with the other auto-update methods I’ve used). I’ve seen examples of this in different webcasts, but seeing those and implement it in the real world code is something else.

Now comes Tim Hubbard’s above post. He provides a very nice VB8 class/implementation to help me do just what I need to do.



Man I dig the Net, RSS and blogs...  :)

Technorati Tags: ClickOnce, Auto-update, ApplicationDeployment