A small executable allowing (semi-) automatic updating of .NET applications.

It works in tests on a few machines, but is by no means production-ready in the traditional sense. (In other words, you can use it to update your application but be ready to do a lot of tech support on users' machines.)

• A web server containing:
  • an XML file declaring the current version
  • a ZIP of the current version, as referenced in the XML

• Add SetonixUpdater to your project as a reference
• Create an instance of SetonixUpdater.Download.UpdateHelper specifying the version currently installed locally and the URL of the XML file with the version information
• Call UpdateHelper.CheckForUpdate(); if this returns true, ask your users whether they want to update (or just do it during startup or shutdown, depending on how draconian you want/need to be)
• Call UpdateHelper.DownloadUpdate(); this returns a DirectoryInfo instance pointing to a temp folder where the ZIP has been decompessed to
• Start the update by calling updateHelper.StartUpdate(System.Diagnostics.Process.GetCurrentProcess().Id, System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location); (That's the process ID of your application and the path to your application's executable)')
• Quit your application

• Setonix Updater makes sure the process ID is not longer pointing to a running process. If it still does after a few seconds, the user gets a "Please close" message and can retry
• All files in the update.manifest are copied from the temp folder to the application folder
• Setonix Updater starts your application and quits
  • An extra command line argument is sent to your application to allow cleaning up the temp folder. You can do this by adding the following statement to your application: args = UpdateHelper.HandleTempFolderCleanup(args); This removes both the temp folder from the disk and the extra argument from args. (If you don't do this, your application will have to ignore a --setonix-cleanup=C:\Users\user\Temp\... argument.)

An XML file on your server:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<versions>
    <version id="1.0.0.1138">
        <name>1.0 beta</name>
        <release-date>2010-01-08</release-date>
        <url>http://your_link_here/app_1.0.0.1138.zip</url>
    </version>
</versions>    

You can theoretically have more than one version in the file, using it as a basis for a download page of older versions or some such, but currently only the entry with the highest version number and the newest release date is used. If the version with the highest version number is not the one with the newest release date, nothing will happen.

This must contain:

• sn update.manifest file (see below)
• all files referenced in the manifest

Both the update.manifest and the ZIP file must contain SetonixUpdater.exe as the unzipped copy in the temp folder is used to perform the update. This allows deploying a newer version of the upater and using it immediately.

Another XML file that has to be in the ZIP file of the new application version and which must be called update.manifest. This declares which files to overwrite in which folders under your application folder.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<manifest>
  <folder path=".">
    <file name="YourApp.exe" />
    <file name="Referenced.dll" />
    <file name="setonix_updater.exe" /> <!-- always include this -->
  </folder>
  <folder path="Data">
    <file name="SomeFile.xml" />
  </folder>
  <messages>
    <message key="appname" language="en">Your Application Name</message>
    <message key="title" language="en">Update</message>
    <message key="wait" language="en">Your Application is being updated. Please wait...</message>
  </messages>
</manifest>

It also declares some bits of text for the updater window:

• appname - the name of your application, currently only used in a message box shown if the application is still running
• title - the window title
• wait - a short message telling the user what's happening

There is some rudimentary logging, which is always done to the system temp folder into a file called setonix_updater_<date>.log. The log level defaults to ERROR and can be set by placing a file called setonix_loglevel.<loglevel> in the temp folder where the extension is one of the following: error, warn, info, debug. (If there are multiple of these files, the most verbose log level wins.)