Create a Self-Updating WinForms App with the Application Updater Block

posted on Thursday, June 10, 2004 11:25 AM

During the past couple of weeks, I've been doing some of my first real dotnet WinForms App development. It's been a fun journey, I'm still learning stuff like crazy. One of the things I wanted to do was enable the app to be self-updating using the ApplicationUpdater Block from MS. This took me a considerable effort to get working right, and I thought that the MS samples lacked a step-by-step example. Duncan Mackenzie has a good blog post here that was a great start, but the examples were VB and it didn't go into the specifics of the Public and Private RSA key stuff, so I thought I'd post this walk through. I hope it works for you!

Step #1 Install the Application Blocks

Download the Updater Application Block from Microsoft .

Run the MSI Installer.

Step #2 Add the Code and References to Your Project:

Add the following projects to the solution containing your Winforms project :

Microsoft.ApplicationBlocks.ApplicationUpdater

Microsoft.ApplicationBlocks.ApplicationUpdater.Interfaces

Microsoft.ApplicationBlocks.ExceptionManagement

Microsoft.ApplicationBlocks.ExceptionManagement.Interfaces

They should be located in the following folder, if you've accepted the defaults

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Application Blocks for .NET\Updater\Code\CS\Microsoft.ApplicationBlocks.Updater

Reference the following projects from within your Winforms Project

Microsoft.ApplicationBlocks.ApplicationUpdater

Microsoft.ApplicationBlocks.ApplicationUpdater.Interfaces

Microsoft.ApplicationBlocks.ExceptionManagement

Add the following namespaces to your form's .cs file.

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

using System.Runtime.Serialization;

using System.Threading;

using System.Diagnostics;

using System.IO;

using System.Xml;

Then add the application updater code located here add the application updater code located here to your code. You'll need to call InitializeAutoUpdate() from your MainForm's Initialize method.

Step #3 Create your Application's Deployment Directory Structure and Configure AppStart.exe

Create a folder for your client installation. For example purposes, we'll use the following directory:

C:\Program Files\YourApp\1.0.0.0\

Now copy the AppStart.exe and AppStart.exe.config into the root directory like so:

C:\Program Files\YourApp\AppStart.exe

C:\Program Files\YourApp\AppStart.exe.config

Note: You can find these two files in the “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Application Blocks for .NET\Updater\Code\CS\Microsoft.ApplicationBlocks.Updater\AppStart\bin\Debug“ directory.

Step #4 Modify the AppStart.exe.config File

AppStart.exe will launch your application and allow a restart once an update has been downloaded. It needs to know the directory to use to launch the latest version of your app.

Modify this config file to match the current version like so:

C:\Program Files\YourApp\1.0.0.0

YourAppName.exe

1.0.0.0

2004-06-10T15:33:17.3745836-04:00

Step #5: Create Your Public and Private Keys

Run the ManifestUtility "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Application Blocks for .NET\Updater\Code\CS\Microsoft.ApplicationBlocks.Updater\ManifestUtility\bin\Debug\ManifestUtility.exe"

Choose “File..Generate Keys” You will be prompted to save the following keys: PublicKey.xml and PrivateKey.xml You'll be using these keys in the next steps.

From what I can tell it's best to create these keys once, because you'll need to reference these RSA public and private keys in a couple of places. You'll want to keep your keys in a safe place, because you'll need them when pushing new updates.

Step #6 Create Your IIS Virtual Directory

Create a directory on your WebServer to house your updates. You will end up with two things in this directory 1) a ServerManifest.xml file which will contain the latest version information, and 2) your new application directory. Within this directory, create a directory to house your new application version. So, for our example, we'll create the directories, C:\Inetpub\AppUpdates and C:\Inetpub\AppUpdates\1.0.0.1

Use IIS Manager to create a virtual directory pointing to this physical directory. Remember your URL, as you will need it in an upcoming step. You will have to enable directory browsing for this virtual directory.

Step #7. Configure Your Version 1.0.0.0 App.config File

Here, we'll need to add a few things. First, we need to add a configSections element to define our appUpdater section: