Check for updates: how to download and install a new version of your C# application

In one of the previous tutorials I described a simple solution that allows an application to check if a new version is available. The solution presented there has two major flaws:

  • while doing the check the main application thread is blocked, thus making the application UI not responsive to user actions
  • after finding a new version the user had to download and install it manually

A moderately skilled C# programmer should be able to solve these two problems easily. So in this tutorial we will learn how to implement our ‘check for updates’ option in a more advanced way. We will work with threads, events and delegates.

Read more