clickonce - what is a good open source alternative to clickonce? (DDay.Update)?

Question

What is a good open source alternative to clickonce? One that is most popular and under active development I guess?

• DDay.Update perhaps? Is this the main one?

thanks

PS. I've come up with a few from searching, but would appreciate any feedback from people how have reviewed these and have an idea of which is most popular/worth looking into first.

• .NET Application Updater Component - http://windowsclient.net/articles/appupdater.aspx

• nlaunch - http://code.google.com/p/nlaunch/

• dotnetautoupdate http://code.google.com/p/dotnetautoupdate/

Answer 1

I'm not actively developing DDay.Update currently, but our business uses it in nearly all of its projects, so I plan on making additions/changes as time goes on. In reality, there aren't a lot of alternatives out there, which is why I undertook developing DDay.Update in the first place.

I've used the .NET Application Updater Component on previous projects, and found it lacking in many ways. I had enough problems with it that I starting looking elsewhere, and found ClickOnce to be a fair improvement on its own merit. At the end of the day, ClickOnce was still overly tedious to customize, and had some pitfalls of its own (as any solution will), so DDay.Update was born with the goals of customization and ease-of-implementation.

Proxy support isn't quite there yet, but I've had requests for it, and even had a patch submitted (which unfortunately can't be used as-is). It should be somewhat simple to add, and I'd like to provide support for this soon. The company where I'm employed has some major projects coming up that will heavily rely on DDay.Update, so I imagine I'll be working on it much more within the next couple of months.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

Some of the GitHub guys wrote Shimmer, a framework based around NuGet packages that is meant to replace ClickOnce.

https://github.com/github/Shimmer

Answer 3

NAppUpdate is an open-source solution I wrote to address specific needs we had for WinForms and WPF apps. The general idea is to have the greatest flexibility, at the lowest overhead possible.

So, integration is super-easy, and the library does pretty much everything for you, including synchronizing operations. It is also highly flexible, and lets you determine what tasks to execute and on what conditions - you make the rules. Last by not least is the support for any updates source (web, BitTorrent, etc) and any feed format - whatever is not implemented you can just write for yourself.

Cold updates (requiring an application restart) is also supported, and done automatically unless "hot-swap" is specified for the task.

This boild down to one DLL, less than 80kb in size.

More details at http://www.code972.com/blog/2010/08/nappupdate-application-auto-update-framework-for-dotnet/

Code is at http://github.com/synhershko/NAppUpdate (Licensed under the Apache 2.0 license)