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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T06:32:55+00:00

We will be embarking on an Application developement project (.NET 3.5) for a large

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We will be embarking on an Application developement project (.NET 3.5) for a large organization. As we started thinking about the upgrades we would be giving across the machines, we are looking at options like ClickOnce.

What we need is a push model, as long as the client machine is connected to the network, the server can send updates. I believe ClickOnce is a pull model(although by specifying minimum version we can kind of push). Also ClickOnce downloads complete files only, it cannot download the change (byte difference) among the files.

Can anyone point me to a better tool that can be used here. Also better strategies, if any, are welcome, we are in a very early stage of the project.

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  1. Editorial Team

    I don’t have a definitive answer on better options, but I’ve used ClickOnce and can offer some advice.

    There are several update options with ClickOnce (before starting, after starting, check every time, check every X Hours/Days/Weeks, etc). You can also throw those out and write code to check for updates. It’s not a “push” from the server, but your client could poll for updates which would be the next best thing. Just remember, the application is going to have to restart after the update to see changes.

    ClickOnce only downloads changed files. However, the progress dialog always shows the entire size of the application even if it’s only downloading a single file. Everyone worries about that, but it’s just a bug with the progress dialog.

    Finally, I’m a big fan of keeping it simple. It’s really easy to over-think these things and create a monstrosity that was never needed. We went through something similar at my company. We were so worried about users downloading unnecessary bytes, we broke our apps up into more, smaller assemblies. It turned into a nightmare; apps were harder to maintain and performed worse on the client. We finally undid it all and wasted weeks just to end up where we started.

    I’m not saying you don’t need the features you’re asking for, I don’t know your scenario. Just educate yourself first and know what you’re getting yourself into.

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