Favorite Autoupdater

[Smartzkid]

Right now, I am using the open source wyUpdate (http://wyday.com/wyupdate/) at work, along with wyBuild (http://wyday.com/wybuild/) ($69). The experience has been marginal at best. No huge issues have arisen, and I love the binary patching and automatic patch creation, but wyBuild isn't updated nearly often enough and has a few prominent issues. My biggest problem with this software is that the file locations for building updates are stored with absolute paths. Additionally, the update checking fails on my development machine for no apparent reason, which is worrisome.

Some other options I have looked into (briefly) are dotnetautoupdate (http://code.google.com/p/dotnetautoupdate/) and Sparkle (http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/). A couple I haven't looked into are Sharp Autoupdater (http://csautoupdater.sourceforge.net/), and NAppUpdate (http://www.code972.com/blog/2010/08/nappupdate-application-auto-update-framework-for-dotnet/).

Has anyone used an autoupdater before? What did you use, and how was your experience?

[Kyle Undefined]

I made me own updater for a program I wrote, it would look up the current version on my FTP and download the files if there was an update.

Wasn't hard to implement, but it wasn't anything advanced either.

[Smartzkid]

Aye, I thought of doing something quite like that.

Many of our files are nonexecutable binary files, so it makes sense to have a noninvasive updater for them. The main issue was that I wasn't allowed to write my own updater using binary patching, so updates would have been an order of magnitude larger.

How did you handle updating executable files? Helper executable?

[Wizzup?]

Aye, I thought of doing something quite like that.

Many of our files are nonexecutable binary files, so it makes sense to have a noninvasive updater for them. The main issue was that I wasn't allowed to write my own updater using binary patching, so updates would have been an order of magnitude larger.

How did you handle updating executable files? Helper executable?

Renaming works as well. That's how Simba does it. On Linux of course, you can just delete it.

[!!1one!eleven1!]

You'll need a helper if the main program has to update itself.