I was asked by an evaluater why we used plain text for summary text. He said he didnt want to write summary text, he just wanted a click-able link to his release notes on his site and he couldn't do that with AppLife Update. I thought I'd share what I told him.

We chose plain text for simplicity. We did'nt want to force on anyone the overhead of rtf, html or anything else. But plain text is actually very flexible. If you look at the summary text as just a text blob that you can enter when publishing an update and read within your application code when an update is found via the CurrentUpdate structure, then you quickly see that you can indeed use Html or Rtf or Xml for summary text.

As an example, if you extract a Custom Forms Quick Start and open the CheckForUpdatesForm, then do the following:

1. Expand the form size a little and drop a WebBrowser Control on the bottom of the form.
2. Add one line of code at line 66 (C#) or line 57 (vb):


You are all set to place html summarytext. Write html into the Update summary box within Make Update and your users will see html.