Question

I have created a Silverlight 4 application, that is running out of browser. As you will know, there is a function that is checking if a new version of the app is available and installing it.

But what if I want to only check for the update and not installing it?

Personally, I do not like applications that silently update themselves, downloading something from the internet. So I’d like to have the following mechanism.
– when the app starts, it checks if updates are available
– if so, I show a messagebox to the user, telling her that there is an update and that she can download and installing it via the update-button
– the user can now decide to update

Unfortunately, there seems to be no option to just checking for updates without actually downloading and installing it. Any ideas, how to achieve this?

Thanks in advance,
Frank

Answer 1

You can roll your own update detection, by having a small file on your server next to the XAP for your app, that contains the latest version. For example:

http://localhost/myawesomeapp.xap
http://localhost/myawesomeapp.xap.ver

When you want to check for updates without downloading them, you can always hit the .ver file, check the version listed in it and if newer then the current running app, show the Update button to the user.

Note that this approach also would allow you to create more advanced scenarios, like prompting the user to upgrade to a different version of the app (Pro for example) or that they need to upgrade their Silverlight to get the latest.

And if you have multiple apps, you can list all of them in that file and do cross-promotion between your apps.