Question

I want to make my software autoupdate itself, but I don’t have extensive webdesign skills, nor any available website/online hosting. I want to do it in C#/WPF.

So I was wondering if there could be a way to make an autoupdate service using google code, something clean. I’m guessing I’m not the first one to think of it.

I’d do it this way:

1) Use a WebBrowser (silently) and navigate to my google code page. On that page I’d put a field where I enter the latest version number. (I need to somehow find that number in the page’s content).

2) I compare that number to the version currently installed (I could put the CURRENT_VER_NUMBER in a *.txt in the software’s folder for example).

3) If I conclude that a new version is available, I download it from the “Downloads” tab of my google code project, unzip it, overwrite the files in the installation directory, and restart the app.

First of all, would that work fine? When I imaginate it, it sounds like dirty code.

Then, I wouldn’t know how to navigate to the downloads tab, even less how to select the latest version there (maybe by doing a very strict file naming), and download it.

And last but not least, If the application is already running in order to perform the update check, I couldn’t overwrite the files without quitting the application, does that mean I have to make some kind of “master app” that performs the check before starting my software? Sounds dirty too =/

Any input is very welcome,

Have a nice day.

Answer 1

I ran into a few problems, but overall it was not so hard. I think the approach is clean so I’m putting it out there if anyone ever wants to achieve something similar.

You’ll have to check out: https://code.google.com/p/theomniscientchimp/ where the full source is available, and of course adjust it for your project.

Thanks for the comments on my original post, made me feel confident i was doing it right =)