Today I decided I would add a ‘check for update’ option to my Eyes Relax application. This is quite useful feature, especially when you host your application on many hosting servers (like download.com and others). In this case it can be difficult for the user to check if there is a newer version of your software available, because:
- the user does not remember where he downloaded the application from
- there is an older version on the hosting server, so the user is not aware that there is a newer version of your app available
- simple, but very common reason: the user is too lazy to look for the new version :P; and because it’s easier to simply select the ‘update’ option in your application, it may work for lazy users
Beside those reasons this is a nice, small feature we can practice our c# programming skills on :). At least for me, because I’ve spent last two years mainly developing server modules in Python. Two major subjects are:
- HTTP file downloading
- simple XML parsing (
XmlTextReader)
Let’s start.