automatically update desktop app

Question

We have a web app and a desktop windows WPF app. Windows app sends data to webapp (hosted on azure)

Users download app from website. There are occasionally new versions of desktop apps available.

What is the most efficient way to setup automatic updates for desktop app? We are using github.

I found "releases" in github but I'm not sure how to notify desktop app and how to create an updater. (I guess we need to check for github releases every time app is started. Do I need to use Github api for this?)

What is the best repository structure for releases?

I'm looking for best practicies on how to perform seamless updates to desktop apps. (In terms of repository setup, creating web api to pull version info maybe?)

Answer 1

You can deploy your desktop applications using ClickOnce Deployment mechanism. This will take care of updating the software. Your users download the software from a publicly accessible Internet site. Whenever you have a new version available, you can simply deploy the latest deployment files on the download link. ClickOnce deployed application automatically check for any updated version on that link and prompt the user to download and install the latest version.

From the same MSDN link, one of the problems solved by ClickOnce deployment is facilitating automated updates:

Difficulties in updating applications. With Microsoft Windows Installer deployment, whenever an application is updated, the user must reinstall the whole application; with ClickOnce deployment, you can provide updates automatically. Only those parts of the application that have changed are downloaded, and then the full, updated application is reinstalled from a new side-by-side folder.

Answer 2

I was looking into accomplishing the same needs and came across this library which can do what you're asking for; https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows

There's a lot of configuration, but what you're asking for is not trivial, but maybe you can get some ideas.

For our needs; we're going have our build server (teamcity) create an MSI using a Wix project then the app will download and execute the MSI. Once we go to production we'll move MSI hosting over to some more enterprise-y CDN type setup.