Question

I have a .NET 4 WPF app that gets installed using an MSI, generated via a visual studio setup project. Everything works great, except that I’m missing the Click Once Deployment feature that checks for new versions of the app on load and downloads/installs them. I switched away from Click Once Deployment because it seems to be a half-baked solution that makes you do hacks just to do simple things like have your app run on startup.

I was wondering if there is any sort of tutorial or code anyone can show me that lays out how to handle checking for new versions of the app, downloading the new version of the app, and installing the new app over the old one. This seems like something that most WPF apps would want to have, I’m surprised that I can’t find anything about this on google.

Answer 1

There is no such inbuilt or ready made tool. In startup of your application you can run your code which does following.

1. Fetch your http://myserver.com/myproduct/update.xml, where you will keep settings of your latest version and url of a new update msi file
2. If update is available that is different then the currently running version, then download the file using WebClient and store it in temp folder
3. You can then create a batch file with following string and store it in temp folder

msiexec /u {your product code}
msiexec /i ..path to your new msi

Finally Execute your batch file using Process.Start and exit your app.