Is it possible to intergrate into windows update to update your own applications?
I have heard of “ClickOnce”, however from what I understand of it so far; it is still the responsibility of the application developer to manage the updates.
I am invisaging a similar user experiance to how an end user may update an application in a Linux distrubution e.g. the update manager in ubuntu. Where application and system updates are centralised.
I understand that you can update for example; office, SQL server etc. So you can do updates to non-core system applications. But of course these are microsoft application, is there a way of a 3rd party to do a similar thing?
Windows Update (and Office Update) are Microsoft run, and while third parties such as nVidia and Intel are allowed to use it for driver updates, it is not an open platform. There is no Windows equivalent of Ubuntu/Debian’s APT repositories, or third party repositories.
ClickOnce probably does what you need. You will have to “manage updates” by uploading a new version of your app to your webserver – not sure how you’d avoid doing that, whatever the system. When users start your app, the ClickOnce system checks for a new version and downloads it automatically. Much cleaner than implementing your own – there must be thousands of different update systems written by different Windows developers!
ClickOnce allows a good deal of customisation – users can choosen when or if they want their apps updated. Developers can set updates as optional or mandatory and be reasonably sure that their entire user base will move up to the latest version (For security fixes etc.). There’s also an API so you can control the update process at a more granular level.