Develop Reference

AutoUpdate using Google Code

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 =)

Minifying and combining files in .net

I am looking at implementing some performance optimization around my javascript/css. In particular looking to achieve the minification and combining of such. I am developing in .net/c# web applications.
I have a couple of options and looking for feedback on each:
First one is this clever tool I came across Chirpy which via visual studio combines, minifies etc -> http://chirpy.codeplex.com/ This is a visual studio add in but as I am in a team environment, this tool isnt ideal.
My next option is to use an Msbuild task (http://yuicompressor.codeplex.com/) to minify the files and also combine them (maybe read from an xml file what needs to be combined). While this works for minifying fine, the concern I have is that I will have to maintain what must be combined which could be a headache.
3rd option is to use msbuild task just for the minifying and at runtime using some helper classes, combine the files on a per page basis. This would combine the files, give it a name and add a version to it.
Any other options I could consider? My concern with the last option is that it may have performance issues as I would have to open the file from the local drive, read its contents and then combine the files. This is alot of processing at run time. I was looking at something like Squishit - https://github.com/jetheredge/SquishIt/downloads This minifies the files at run time but I would look at doing this at compile time.
So any feedback on my approaches would be great? If the 3rd option would not cause performance issues, I am leading towards it.

We have done something similar with several ASP.NET web applications. Specifically, we use the Yahoo Yui compressor, which has a .NET library version which you can reference in your applications.
The approach we took was to generate the necessary merged/minified files at runtime. We wrapped all this logic up into an ASP.NET control, but that isn't necessary depending on your project.
The first time a request is made for a page, we process through the list of included JS and CSS files. In a separate thread (so the original request returns without delay) we then merged the included files together (1 for JS, 1 for CSS), and then apply the Yui compressor.
The result is then written to disk for fast reference in the future
On subsequent requests, the page first looks for the minified versions. If found, it just serves those up. If not, it goes through the process again.
As some icing to the cake:
For debug purposes, if the query string ?debug=true is present, the merged/minified resources are ignored and the original individual files are served instead (since it can be hard to debug optimized JS)
We have found this process to work exceptionally well. We built it into a library so all our ASP.NET sites can take advantage. The post-build scripts can get complicated if each page has different dependencies, but the run-time can determine this quite easily. And, if someone needs to make a quick fix to a CSS file, they can do so, delete the merged versions of the file, and the process will automatically start over without need to do post-build processing with MSBuild or NAnt.

RequestReduce provides a really nice solution for combining and minifying javascript and css at run time. It will also attempt to sprite your background images. It caches the processed files and serves them using custom ETags and far future headers. RequestReduce uses a response filter to transform the content so no code or configuration is needed for basic functionality. It can be configured to work in a web farm environment and sync content accross several servers and can be configured to point to a CDN. It can be downloaded at http://www.RequestReduce.com or from Visual Studio via Nuget. The source is available at https://github.com/mwrock/RequestReduce.

have you heard of Combres ?
go to : http://combres.codeplex.com and check it out
it minifies your CSS and JS files at Runtime meaning you can change any file and upload it and each request the client does it minifies it.
all you gotta do is add the files u wanna compress to a list in the combres XML file and just call the list from your page / masterpage.
if you are using VS2010 you can easily install it on your project using NuGet
here's the Combres NuGet link: http://combres.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=5-Minute%20Quick%20Start

I did a really nice solution to this a couple of years back but I don't have the source left. The solution was for webforms but it should work fine to port it to MVC. I'll give it a try to explain what I did in some simple step. First we need to register the scripts and we wrote a special controller that did just that. When the controller was rendered it did three things:
Minimize all the files, I think we used the YUI compression
Combine all the files and store as string
Calculate a hash for the string of the combined files and use that as a virtual filename. You store the string of combined files in a cached dictionary on the server with the hash value as key, the html that is rendered needs to point to a special folder where the "scripts" are located.
The next step is to implement a special HttpHandler that handles request for files in the special folder. When a request is made to that special folder you make a lookup in the cached dictionary and returns the string bascially.
One really nice feature of this is that the returned script is always valid so the user will never have to ask you for an update of the script. The reason for that is when you make a change to any of the script files the hash value will change and the client will ask for a new script.
You can use this for css-files as well with no problems. I remebered making it configurable so you could turn off combine files, minimize files, or just exclude one file from the process if you wanted to do some debugging.
I might have missed some details, but it wasn't that hard to implement and it turned out very well.
Update: I've implemented a solution for MVC and released it on nuget and have the source up on github.

Microsoft’s Ajax minifier is suprisingly good as a minification tool. I wrote a blog post on combining files and using their minifier in a javascript and stylesheet handler:
http://www.markistaylor.com/javascript-concatenating-and-minifying/

It's worthwhile combining the files at run time to avoid having to synchronise new versions. However, once they are programmatically combined, cache them to disk. Then the code which runs each time the files are fetched need only check that the files haven't changed before serving the cached version.
If they have changed, then the compression code can run as a one-off.
Whilst there will be a slight performance cost, you will also receive a performance benefit from fewer file requests.
This is the approach that the Minify tool uses to compress JS/CSS, which has worked really well for me. It's Linux/PHP only, but you might get some more ideas there too.

I needed a solution for combining/minifying CSS/JS on a .NET 2.0 web app and SquishIt and other tools I found weren't .NET 2.0-compatible, I created my own solution that uses a syntax similar to SquishIt but is compatible with .NET 2.0. Since I thought other people might find it useful I put it up on Github. You can find it here: https://github.com/AlliterativeAlice/simpleyui

Patch an application

I need to create a patching routine for my application,
it's really small but I need to update it daily or weekly
how does the xdelta and the others work?
i've read around about those but I didn't understand much of it
the user shouldn't be prompted at all

Ok this post got flagged on meta for the answers given, so I'm going to weigh in on this.
xdelta is a binary difference program that, rather than providing you with a full image, only gives you what has changed and where. An example of a text diff will have + and - signs before lines of text showing you that these have been added or removed in the new version.
There are two ways to update a binary image: replace it using your own program or replace it using some form of package management. For example, Linux Systems use rpm etc to push out updates to packages. In a windows environment your options are limited by what is installed if you're not on a corporate network. If you are, try WSUS and MSI packaging. That'll give you an easier life, or ClickOnce as someone has mentioned.
If you're not however, you will need to bear in mind the following:
You need to be an administrator to update anything in certain folders as others have said. I would strongly encourage you to accept this behaviour.
If the user is an administrator, you can offer to check for updates. Then, you can do one of two things. You can download a whole new version of your application and write it over the image on the hard disk (i.e. the file - remember images are loaded into memory so you can re-write your own program file). You then need to tell the user the update has succeeded and reload the program as the new image will be different.
Or, you can apply a diff if bandwidth is a concern. Probably not in your case but you will need to know from the client program the two versions to diff between so that the update server gives you the correct patch. Otherwise, the diff might not succeed.
I don't think for your purposes xdelta is going to give you much gain anyway. Just replace the entire image.
Edit if the user must not be prompted at all, just reload the app. However, I would strongly encourage informing the user you are talking on their network and ask permission to do so / enable a manual update mode, otherwise people like me will block it.

What kind of application is this ? Perhaps you could use clickonce to deploy your application. Clickonce very easily allows you to push updates to your users.
The short story is, Clickonce creates an installation that allows your users to install the application from a web server or a file share, you enable automatic updates, and whenever you place a new version of the app on the server the app will automatically(or ask the user wether to) update the app. The clickonce framework takes care of the rest - fetching the update , figure out which files have changed and need to be downloaded again and performs the update. You can also check/perform the update programatically.
That said, clickonce leaves you with little control over the actual installation procedure, and you have nowhere close to the freedom of building your own .msi.

I wouldn't go with a patching solution, since it really complicates things when you have a lot of revisions. How will the patching solution handle different versions asking to be updated? What if user A is 10 revisions behind the current revision? Or 100 revisions, etc? It would probably be best to just download the latest exe(s) and dll(s) and replace them.
That said, I think this SO question on silent updates might help you.

There is a solution for efficient patching - it works on all platforms and can run in completely silent mode, without the user noticing anything. On .NET, it provides seamless integration of the update process using a custom UserControl declaratively bound to events from your own UI.
It's called wyUpdate.
While the updating client (wyUpdate) is open source, a paid for wybuild tool is used to build and publish the patches.

Depending on the size of your application, you'd probably have it split up into several dll's, an exe, and other files.
What you could do is have the main program check for updates. If updates are available, the main program would close and the update program would take over - updating old files, creating new ones, and deleting current files as specified by the instructions sent along with a patch file (probably a compressed format such as .zip) downloaded by the updater.
If your application is small (say, a single exe) it would suffice to simply have the updater replace that one exe.
Edit:
Another way to do this would be to (upon compilation of the new exe), compare the new one to the old one, and just send the differences over to the updater. It would then make the appropriate adjustments.

You can make your function reside in a separate DLL. So you can just replace the DLL instead of patching the whole program. (Assuming Windows as the target platform for a C# program.)

Updating a desktop application without touching the attached .mdf

Just a quick question:
I'm in the finalizing state of my current C# project, and I'd like to send a version out to people that has 90% of the features initially requested, but it'll be a version of the software that will do all they need - they need the software as soon as possible, basically.
Therefore I'm going to be using the online install option in VS2008 that will use updating to add the final few features, as well as additional things, later. What I'm wondering is the following:
The program will come packaged with a .mdf file. When I create a new version of the program however, I don't want to change all of the data that has been added to the database already. My question is how do I go about doing this?
Thanks!

How are you planning to distribute the update? An installer will have flags indicating when a file should be replaced. (Date, version etc)
One-Click installation has the ability to check for changes on program startup.

How To Store Files In An EXE

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.