Question

I am trying to create a moderately complex web page. This is not something I have ever done before, and nor do I feel happy about doing it, but I need to do it. I am not asking you to write it for me, mealy tell me what to research and learn, so that I can hopefully, eventually get it done.

I have not got a clue about how to start, and this is my question.

I need to make an autoupdater for my application. This has been done, and it is working perfectly. However, my application currently downloads version.txt, and reads it to work out whether it needs to download the new application. This is hideous, and slow, and was only supposed to be very temporary. It is also very annoying that we have to update this file every time we release a new version.

My boss wants me to create a webpage that reads the version data from the uploaded .exe, and then returns that to the Desktop application. Therefore, I would be able to call http://www.example.com/version.aspx, and it would return the version number, such as 1.1. I could then compare to the current version (don’t worry, it is generated on the fly, and not hard coded) and then I could download the application if required.

Here comes my question. How would I go about this? I have heard of CGI scripts, and asp.net. Which one of these has the power to solve my problem. If you could just tell me that, then I will be all sorted, as I could read up on it, learn, and broaden my knowledge.

If this is not possible, or not easily possible, is there any way of reading the file version of a remote .exe, without downloading it. This would also be preferable in many ways.

Thank you so much, and I am so sorry for my complete ignorance in this topic.

Richard

P.S. I did try to explain this to my boss, and suggested that maybe he could either do it, or help me, but he is not very good at web applications, and refused, saying that it would broaden my education in this matter. Ahhh!

EDIT: Somehow forgot to add: I normally program in C#, although this application should be so small, that it would not really matter. Also, C# code would be ideal, if there is a way to check the version of a file on a remote server.

EDIT: Thanks!

Answer 1

If you can read the version of some exe file from within a desktop application, using C#, then you can use the exact same code to read it from within an ASP.Net web application.

The advantage of asp.net over CGI (in your case) is that you can use C# in the backend.

A couple of hints:

• Server.MapPath(“file.exe”) returns the complete pathname of a “file.exe” next to the requested aspx file, independent of where you install that web-application.
• If you only want to return the version number, use

this code:

Response.Clear(); 
Response.Write(versionnumber);
Response.End();

in a Page_Load method, after you have read the versionnumber of the exe, of course.