Question

I’m using the Application Updates option in Visual Studio with ‘Before the Application Starts’ checked.

Users are complaining of canceling the update and then finding out they really want the update. When they decide they want to update there is no way for them to update the application until I publish a new version, because once they cancel the dialog box it never shows up again.

Is there a way to create a menu option to force a check for updates?

Kind of off-topic… Are there any open source Application Update programs for .NET?

Answer 1

I finally solved this by using the ApplicationDeployment.CheckForUpdate Method.

In a nutshell it’s:

Dim updateAvailable As Boolean = False
Dim AD As Deployment.Application.ApplicationDeployment = Deployment.Application.ApplicationDeployment.CurrentDeployment
updateAvailable = AD.CheckForUpdate()
If updateAvailable Then
    AD.Update()
End If

There is a much more thorough example of how to manually check for updates on MSDN