Question

Is there any utility that will copy the ‘official’ build of a windows forms app from a central network share and launch it (from a client desktop)? I want to make sure users get the latest version when I update the binaries on the central network share.

ClickOnce is user un-friendly so I’m looking for something else…

Answer 1

I’ve done this before by the following method:

1 – Keep the ‘official’ build at a specific network location

2 – User launches program from their local machine

3 – At launch, program compares its’ own file version # to the one on the server.

4 – If the two versions are different, copy the new version down from the server and relaunch.

Pretty simple, and it works as long as you are in an intranet environment.

Step 4 is the only tricky part. You can’t replace a file while it’s in use, so you have to either

1 – first rename the current (in-use) file and then copy down the new one. Since you will be updating many times, you’ll also want to delete any existing renamed copies that are hanging around.

or

2 – Have the user launch a ‘helper’ application that does the version check, updates if necessary, and then launches the real app. Of course then you have to deal with updating the helper app.