Our current software updates are hosted on our server.
We'd like to offer Torrents as an alternative download option from our server. When new releases are published it should offer people better download speeds if people seed it.
I've figured out everything except how to create a Torrent file automatically (we'd rather not have to create it manually each time).
Does anyone know how we can create a torrent file from a specified exe file?
Thanks!
MonoTorrent seems like it might be of help. I've previously compiled and run it under .net, so no worries there.
This looks like the relevant wiki page.
As usual, it's probably best to check license compatibility before integrating with your product, but it looks quite permissive.
Of course, you'll need to host the torrent to ensure at least a single seed!
Related
OK, so my hard disk just crashed. Big deal. All my web dev code that was on it went along with it, and now I'm running ddrescue on Ubuntu trying to recover whatever data I can recover. The hard disk keeps disconnecting and sometimes it can quit responding for a long time so it's really a pain in the ass.
Anyway, back to the main topic--I have my web dev code which was packaged and uploaded to Azure; now what I'm wondering is if it's possible to obtain all my .cs files from the VM. I noticed approot and siteroot folders, but all I saw were the views, the .asax file, some other misc, stuff, nothing with the .cs extension.
Is there any way I can get a copy of the code I packaged? or (as a last resort) any way to get the .cspkg file and work from there?
The site you are seeing on the web role and inside the cspkg file is the output of the compile, so you can't get the original .cs files out of them. That said, you can use a tool like Reflector, Just Decompile, or a variety of other decompilers out there to reverse engineer your compiled bits into something that will be very close to the original C# code (not I'm assuming this is your own code, or code that doesn't have a provision against reverse engineering). This at least will let you use the bits on the webrole to get the majority of your code back, then review it to see how good a job it did.
Note, you can open the cspkg file. It's just a zip file. You can rename with a .zip file extension and open it up, but you won't find the .cs files in there. The only time you find this to be the case is if you have multiple websites within a single web role. The default packager for Windows Azure doesn't compile the additional sites, only packages up all the files in their root directory. Not at all helpful for actual deployments really, but this won't likely help you.
You are likely well ahead of me on this, but I'd recommend using a personal source control system of some sort to avoid this issue in the future.
I have recently been assigned a task which sounded relatively simple!
Upon attempting it became clear it wasn't as straight forward as i first imagined!!!
I am trying to download multiple files to one location on the users machine. They select these files from lists within a custom share-point web part. Thats the bit i have managed to get working! The downloading is done via WebClient (System.Net.WebClient)
I now want to allow the user to select a location on their local machine to download the files to.
I thought i would be able to use but after attempting this i realized i can only pick files :( in order to get the desired location which will confuse the user
I want something similar to the above but i only need it to return a path location like c:\Temp or any other location the user prefers on their local machine.
Could anyone suggest a control that could provide this functionality. It can also be a share-point control.
In the meantime I will be attempting Tree view as i have never used these before and these may have the power to do this from what i have read
Cheers
Truez
Clarity on language ASP.NET
Unfortunately, you can't do this without some kind of active content, like a Flash control or spit activeX /spit.
It seems strange at first, but you have to consider that this kind of functionality would let a site discover the structure of anyones storage devices; this is not 'a good thing'™
However, perhaps a different approach might solve the problem?
Why are you using WebClient, can't you provide the link to the client and let them choose their own download folder ?
I ended up zipping the files in to one folder and passed the file to be downloaded through the browser! Thanks for your comments!
I want to make my software autoupdate itself, but I don't have extensive webdesign skills, nor any available website/online hosting. I want to do it in C#/WPF.
So I was wondering if there could be a way to make an autoupdate service using google code, something clean. I'm guessing I'm not the first one to think of it.
I'd do it this way:
1) Use a WebBrowser (silently) and navigate to my google code page. On that page I'd put a field where I enter the latest version number. (I need to somehow find that number in the page's content).
2) I compare that number to the version currently installed (I could put the CURRENT_VER_NUMBER in a *.txt in the software's folder for example).
3) If I conclude that a new version is available, I download it from the "Downloads" tab of my google code project, unzip it, overwrite the files in the installation directory, and restart the app.
First of all, would that work fine? When I imaginate it, it sounds like dirty code.
Then, I wouldn't know how to navigate to the downloads tab, even less how to select the latest version there (maybe by doing a very strict file naming), and download it.
And last but not least, If the application is already running in order to perform the update check, I couldn't overwrite the files without quitting the application, does that mean I have to make some kind of "master app" that performs the check before starting my software? Sounds dirty too =/
Any input is very welcome,
Have a nice day.
I suggest you take a look at ClickOnce. It doesn't require you to create a webpage. You only need to host 2 files: a .manifest file that contains information about your app (version, name and a link to the package that contains your application) and the latest version of your application package. The only thing you need to do is host those 2 files and put a link on your Google Code page to that .manifest file. Users click that link and .net will automatically install or check for the latest version and update if necessary.
You may want to have a look at a library I wrote and released as open-source to do just that transparently - including an external update application to do the actual cold update. See http://www.code972.com/blog/2010/08/nappupdate-application-auto-update-framework-for-dotnet/
The code is at http://github.com/synhershko/NAppUpdate (Licensed under the Apache 2.0 license)
I ran into a few problems, but overall it was not so hard. I think the approach is clean so I'm putting it out there if anyone ever wants to achieve something similar.
You'll have to check out: https://code.google.com/p/theomniscientchimp/ where the full source is available, and of course adjust it for your project.
Thanks for the comments on my original post, made me feel confident i was doing it right =)
What would be the Most secure and Safe way to allow software to auto-update without opening too many holes to enable a hacker easy access to a system?
Have you looked into ClickOnce Deployment?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/t71a733d(VS.80).aspx
The short overview is here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/142dbbz4(VS.80).aspx
I recommend not building your own auto-update, use ClickOnce if it works for you or a commercial auto-update component if not.
If you want to see what is involved I wrote a series about writing an auto-update component on my blog some time ago, the last post with links to all the posts in the series is at: http://www.nbdtech.com/blog/archive/2007/08/07/How-To-Write-an-Automatic-Update-System-Part-8.aspx
If you are going to make your own system then you will probably want to have a public/private key pair.
So, you would zip up the update.
Then encrypt with the private key on the server.
The client can then decrypt and unzip it, and then install it.
That way, as long as your private key is secure then you can ensure that the update is legit.
The only weakness here is that if someone changed the public key to some other key, then they could fool that program into thinking that a trojan is a valid update.
There are various schemes you can use to get around this, but that would depend on how much work you want to put into this.
ClickOnce auto update is all fair and well but anyone can admit that it is not the most of fashionable solution. I've recently developed a solution that requires such an auto-update feature. Here is a list of brief steps I took to deploying my very own updating service that also allows for roll-backs with 'minimal' know-how.
Add a Setup project to the solution so that the project could be wrapped up neatly in a .exe or .msi installer package.
The following is to setup a FTP server with your desired user credential that only your application knows. On the ftp server, setup a default directory for where you will put any new updates.
Your application will check for internet connection on start-up, log into your remote FTP server and check for any new files to download.
Download new updates to your client application and put them in a date-time named folder for future reference. Some checks need to be in place to make sure that you don't download the same old files.
Close the application and run the new installation. Depending on how you setup your Setup project, the installation wizard may remove the previous version completely or just update partial (patches, etc.).
Your application may have a feature to roll-back to previous version by going into the local update directory and fish out the previously downloaded files. This is where the date-time stamped files come in handy for reference.
This solution offers a level of customization that I think most Enterprise solutions will need and I found that it works very effectively for me. FTP servers are secure and reliable as far as file downloads are involved. You can find a lot of FTP download helper library on the internet so its a matter of making work the way you want and not worry too much about how it works.
Alright, so I'm working on programming my own installer in C#, and what I'd like to do is something along the lines of put the files in the .exe, so I can do
File.Copy(file, filedir);
Or, if this isn't possible, is there another way of doing what I am attempting to do?
I wouldn't code my own installer, but if you truely want to embed files into your assembly you could use strongly typed resources. In the properties dialog of your project open up the "Resources" tab and then add your file. You'll then be able to get the file using:
ProjectNamespace.Properties.Resources.MyFile
Then you'll be able to write the embedded resource to disk using:
System.IO.File.WriteAllBytes(#"C:\MyFile.bin", ProjectNamespace.Properties.Resources.MyFile);
Honestly, I would suggest you NOT create your own installer. There are many many issues with creating installers. Even the big installer makers don't make their own actual installers anymore, they just create custom MSI packages.
Use Mirosoft Installer (MSI). It's the right thing to do. Make your own custom front-end for it, but don't recreate the already very complex wheel that exists.
UPDATE: If you're just doing this for learning, then I would shy away from thinking of it as "an installer". You might be tempted to take your "research" and use it someday, and frankly, that's how we end up with so many problems when new versions of Windows come out. People create their own wheels with assumptions that aren't valid.
What you're really trying to do is called "packaging", and you really have to become intimately familiar with the Executable PE format, because you're talking about changing the structure of the PE image on disk.
You can simulate it, to a point, with putting files in resources, but that's not really what installers, or self-extractors do.
Here's a link to Self-Extractor tutorial, but it's not in C#.
I don't know enough about the .NET PE requirements to know if you can do this in with a managed code executable or not.
UPDATE2: This is probably more of what you're looking for, it embeds files in the resource, but as I said, it's not really the way professional installers or self-extractors do it. I think there are various limitations on what you can embed as resources. But here's the like to a Self-Extractor Demo written in C#.
I'm guessing here, but if you are trying to store resources in your application before compilation, you can in the Project Explorer, right click a file you would like to add, chose properties and change the type to Embedded Resource.
You can then access the embedded resources later by using the instructions from this KB:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319292
in case you simply want to store multiple files in a single file storage (and extract files from there, interact etc.) you might also want to check out NFileStorage, a .net file storage. written in 100% .NET C# with all sources included. It also comes with a command line interpreter that allows interaction from the command line.