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C# application says "No" when executed

I have developed a small-ish C# console application (TextMatcher.exe) on my local development machine and now need to deploy it to the live environment. It references another class library which I developed which has generic functions, which I intend to use and improve in future console applications.
Ultimately this specific application will be executed from within an SSIS package, but for now I'm just trying to run it from cmd.
I kid you not that this is the actual output from the program:
E:/TextMatcher>TextMatcher.exe
No
E:/TextMatcher>
The computer literally says "No" and gives no further information. I have not included, anywhere in the program, to output the word "No", on any failure or otherwise.
Of course, it runs fine locally. I made sure I included the dll of the utility class library too. I have read other questions (here, here) about how to deploy console apps correctly, and have followed the advice.
NB: This is also proving to be quite hard to Google because of the use of the word "No" being fundamental to the problem...
EDIT - It seems to be working now... I simply copied over the files again from my local machine to the remote machine... I am trying to get it to break again so that I can figure out what on Earth happened, and until I do, I will not accept an answer so that people could maybe shed some more light onto it. Either way it is quite baffling.

There's a chance that someone has modified the Image File Execution Options registry setting on the server to launch a debugger automatically.
In short, examine the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\currentversion\image file execution options and see if there's an entry that matches the name of your executable.

Check whether you have installed the necessary Framework components,
i.e. the suiting Dot net framework. Application with 4.0 and installed 3.5
can cause very strange behaviour.
Try writing a very simple window application and start it on the deployment machine
(this will give you probably more help what is missing).
Check whether the needed Dlls (that you developed, e.g. your class library) are reachable for the console application. And check whether the right version of your Dll is matched!
Check the plattform settings in your console application. Do they match with
the machine where you want to run your application? (win64 and win32 mismatch)
If all of those do not help, try inspecting your executable on the deployment machine
for example with depends.net, checkasm, or similar.

Does your production environment have AppLocker running? I don't know if its output can be customized to output "No" on a command line. Applocker comes to my mind because you can use it to restrict a system to run only signed executables. If your Textmatcher executable is unsigned, it may get shut down immediately. If you have the ability, I'd be curious to see if signing your binary changes the behavior.

Online updating a C# program

Greetings,
I'm sorry if this question has been asked already. I've tried using the search function but couldn't find any answer that suited my situation.
I have a real simple C# form application of only 1 file, a exe.
I distributed this currently by 4shared where people can download it as pleased.
However, every time I make changes to the program people will have to download the new version from 4shared.
Now this isn't a ideal situation and I'm a noob when it comes to creating upgrade but the situation I wish is that the program looks at a website / ftp server where I deploy a new version.
I'm looking for a way inside my program to look at the file on that website / ftp server and decide wether there's a new version available.
If there is a new version available in the website / ftp server I would like for the program to update itself to the newest version.
Hope you guys can help me out with this and I hope I explained my situation enough !

NetSparkle is a nice alternative to click-once with more deployment options. http://netsparkle.codeplex.com/

Have a look at ClickOnce. It will do this for you.

When I'm developing and publishing such applications, I usually do it the following way:
Develop a .NET Windows Forms application
Develop a tiny ASP.NET application with an ASMX web service.
Publish the ASMX web service to my public web site.
Add a WSDL reference for the web service to my Windows Forms application.
Create a setup (I prefer Unicode NSIS over ClickOnce).
The logic I implement in the SOAP web service is basically a single function:
[WebMethod]
public string CheckUpdateAvailable( string currentVersion )
{
...
}
The Windows Forms application calls this method (e.g. from a background thread upon program start), passing its current assembly version as a string to the function.
The WSDL function in turn checks the passed version against the newest setup version (e.g. being stored inside web.config or extracted live from the setup.exe on the server). If a newer version exists, it return a string with the URL to download from; otherwise it returns NULL.
When the caller of the WSDL function gets a non-NULL string, it can show a message to the user, asking whether he wants to download and install the executable and then simply execute the URL (via Process.Start).

WyUpdate is the way to go here. We've been using it for over a year with great results (they have excellent support too).
It actually uses patches to update files so that when a 5MB executable only has a small change, the client only has to download a file in the order of kilobytes.
They supply an automatic update component for either Windows Forms or WPF that looks nice and works great.
You can host the update files on either an FTP server or a normal website without any server-side configuration.
There's plenty more to it, and the best place to start is with their video tutorial of how to set up an update.

Here's an open-source library I wrote to address specific needs we had for WinForms and WPF apps. The general idea is to have the greatest flexibility, at the lowest overhead possible. All you'll have to do is create an update feed and reference the library from your app.
So, integration is super-easy, and the library does pretty much everything for you, including synchronizing operations. It is also highly flexible, and lets you determine what tasks to execute and on what conditions - you set the rules (or use some that are there already). Last by not least is the support for any updates source (web, BitTorrent, etc) and any feed format - whatever is not implemented you can just write for yourself.
Cold updates (requiring an application restart) is also supported, and done automatically unless "hot-swap" is specified for the task.
This all boils down to one DLL, less than 70kb in size.
More details at http://www.code972.com/blog/2010/08/nappupdate-application-auto-update-framework-for-dotnet/
Code is at http://github.com/synhershko/NAppUpdate (Licensed under the Apache 2.0 license)
I plan on extending it more when I'll get some more time, but honestly you should be able to quickly enhance it yourself for whatever it currently doesn't support.

Automatic update

I have a system with two web applications, one web service, one Windows service and a WPF application running 24 hours a day on a touch screen. All of them are connected to a database.
I want to be able to upgrade all of those applications by uploading upgrade files to the database and set the date and time for the upgrade to occur.
I have one idea on how to do this.
An application has a thread running to look for available upgrades.
When an upgrade is found, the file is downloaded to the application's computer.
When download is complete, the applications triggers a restart.
When application starts, it looks for an upgrade file on the local computer.
If upgrade is available, the application upgrades itself.
I'm not really sure how all these steps should be done yet, especially the last one. But I want some comments about this. Is this completely wrong? Am I on the right track? Any tips on how to do it like this or in another way?

I think you're going down the right lines here. A polling application to check the database for the existence of a new update followed by an xcopy deployment script would do it.
This might be doable from a PowerShell script too, that runs on a schedule, say every 10 minutes. It could check the database, close the process and service, xcopy the application (from a shared source) and restart the said service and app.
All this assumes that you are not using Windows Installer to package and deploy your application initially. Although an xcopy to directly replace binaries wouldn't hurt an MSI package, it's not recommended. We use AD MSI deployment at work and it's a pain at the best of times!
MSDN contains references for MSI vs XCopy deployment for WPF applications (as well as the security requirements).
This was the first link I found for querying SQL from PowerShell: http://elegantcode.com/2008/03/27/discovering-windows-powershell/
Good luck!

You will have trouble doing this with ClickOnce. ClickOnce would only work for your WPF app, it can't do anything with the services or web application. You could write a separate ClickOnce-deployed "Updater" app whose job is to update the other apps, but that still seems a little iffy.
It may sound stupid, but I'd start with the simplest thing I could think of. How about using Dropbox to push your update files; then an AutoHotKey script that runs on startup, watches the Dropbox folder for new updates, and runs them?
Sounds hokey, but it's something you could prove out in an hour or two.

Microsoft have an Updater Application Block which might be what you are looking for.

Do you really want to run an update from the database or is this just a possible solution? You are reinventing the wheel.
Have a look at ClickOnce deployment, everything you need is already done for you and integrated into VisualStudio. If you use something that already exists you have the benefit of existing documentation, helpful blogs of people who have already gone through the pain points and updates and fixes.
ClickOnce Deployment
ClickOnce Deployment in .NET Framework 2.0
How you want to use ClickOnce depends on what you want to get out of it. Out of the box you can very easily create a deployment that checks for an upgrade every time you run the application but you can also with a little bit of code have the application check for updates whilst it is running.
The Updater Application BlockVersion that Dominic Zukiewicz mentioned is the pre cursor to ClickOnce.
EDIT
ClickOnce provides a roll-back scenario on both the Server and Client end. The client can roll back to a previous version using the normal add remove programs dialogue and you can easily republish a previous version.

You could create another Windows Service that does the updates on a daily basis. The service would look on a specific folder if there are any updates to be process. For example it could look for an xml file which tells it the new version of the application and what the files to update are. It would shut down the application/services, backup the files that it needs to update, start the application/services, and clean up backup files keeping at least three backup files. The service should keep track of the last and current version installed so that when it reads the xml file it can check if it is a new update or not or you can simply delete the xml file when it completes.

How about Google Omaha? It's an open source tool, currently used to push updates of Google Chrome and Google Earth. Omaha can handle application installation, too. A high-level design overview can be found here.

Windows seems to lose track of .NET application

We have a .NET application that we distribute to our users via an MSI installer package. We have C++ applications that run each morning to see if the user's copy of the application is out of date, and if so, we pull down the new MSI and install it. If the application is running, we need to take it down so we can perform the update.
Our problem is that every once in a while it seems like windows "loses" our application. It will not report that the process is running - though it is. It will allow us to overwrite, or even delete, the in-use executable file without taking down the application.
Maybe this is something that is common -- but we can't figure out what is going on! Does anyone have any insight into this situation?
It seems like a temporary copy of our application is getting created, and the program is getting ran from that. But if that is the case, why doesn't it happen all the time?
EDIT:
In our program, We are using the "EnumProcesses" function from the Platform SDK, PSAPI.dll, to enumerate all of the running processes.

Could it be that either the script or the application runs as a 64-bit program, and the other as a 32-bit program? If so, then on 64-bit machines the update check could be looking in the wrong location for an existing application and thus reporting it as missing?

What mechanism are you using to check to see if the process is running or not?
Try using something like process explorer to see what path the executable image is loaded from - it should be listed in the modules section.

Programatically batch files to copy at night

I need to create an Intranet website (page) which allows users to indicate a local network folder to copy to a production location. Currently this is done manually using xcopy in batch files.
What I am looking for is approaches on triggering the copy so it's done in the middle of the night and an approach to copy the files. I suppose I can run xcopy from my application, but is this a good way to do this? Should I use System.IO name space objects to copy the files? Is there a better way all together?
The application will be written in C# and ASP.NET. We currently use .NET 2.0/3.0, but I have no issues using .NET 3.5 if it contains better libraries for the solution.
Basically a user will indicate which network folder they need copied along with some other business information. The folder indicated and all sub-folders need to be copied to target location (not set by user).
If there is already an application out there which does this, I am not opposed to that either. I have no need to write stuff that already exists.

For the first problem (copying at midnight), I suggest setting up a scheduled task that runs the already existing batch file (or any program, for that matter)

For the scheduling part you could use Quartz.NET
It won't be difficult to write an xcopy operation in C# using System.IO. In fact, this would give you the greatest degree of flexibility.

I think you should consider using Windows Powershell to do your copying (or another scripting language if you prefer), driven by Windows Scheduled Tasks. Though you could write an application to do this, I think it would be much more maintainable to have a script that others could edit.

The simplest solution would be to wrap your xcopy commands in a command file and schedule it to run whenever you want as a Scheduled Task on your web server.
If you want to get fancy, you can write up a web interface to the task scheduler - I'm pretty sure I've seen open source examples of that type of application too.

you've tagged this ASP but if you aren't fussy I'd recommend a combination of Windows builtin Scheduled Tasks and rsync. If it really has to be automated from an intranet page (and you're in IE) then some form of ActiveX or downloadable script/application would be needed to configure the schedule.