Welcome to AppLife Update! AppLife Update provides incredible flexibility in implementing an update process within your software application. You can choose to use the AppLife Manager Windows service or integrate directly into your application with four built-in and ready to use update processes. Or take advantage of the flexibility provided by the AppLife Update API and easily develop your own updating user experience.
With your deployed maintenance process looking and behaving the way you want, the actions that you can utilize in maintaining your deployed installations from one version to the next is just as flexible. Many common Windows application updating activities, such as file and registry manipulation, come ready-to-use. Just drag, drop and configure them in your action list. And if you don’t find a built-in action that meets your needs, you can use the Dynamic Code Action to write your own .Net updating code, or create your own reusable custom actions. We’ll show you how.
Within this Quick Start guide, we demonstrate how to use
AppLife Update to maintain your applications. Using the AppLife Manager, a
direct integration approach, or a customize AppLife Update implementation to
meet your specific updating requirements.
1.
AppLife Manager
This quick start will walk through the process of
creating a new application on an AppLife Server, setting up an AppLife Project
to publish updates for the application, and publishing an initial update that
will install the application on deployed systems running AppLife
Manager.
2.
Simple
The simple quick start application implements the AppLife
Update solution in its simplest form. We enable a brand new WinForms
application for updating with AppLife Update. This implementation might
just be all that you need.
3.
Simple – WPF
The simple WPF quick start uses the AppLife WPF updating
control to implement updating features into a WPF application.
4.
Custom Forms
The Custom Forms application utilizes methods and events
on the Update Controller to check for, download, and apply an update. The
application replaces the built-in updating user interface with a completely
custom one. The tasks that you learn in this quick start can be used to
design and implement many different updating processes.
5.
Custom Actions
This example demonstrates how to create a custom
action, as well as a corresponding custom action builder and custom action
editor to provide an Update Action that will perform a text file search on the
deployed client that is being updated for a designated regular expression. The
results are then further manipulated with customized .Net code using a
Dynamic Code Action.
After you have reviewed these quick starts, you will be well prepared to implement AppLife Update into your own applications. Please refer to this help manual in its entirety, as well as the AppLife Update API reference, which can be accessed through the AppLife Update Help menu or Online, for more information on using the AppLife Update product to integrate an update process, and deploy software updates into your own applications.
To work through these quick starts, you will need to have AppLife Update and Visual Studio installed on your computer. For the AppLife Manager walk through, you will need access to an AppLife Server or an AppLife Update Cloud subscription.
If you have not already done so, install AppLife Update to your local system.
NOTE: All of the Quick Starts come with a precompiled version 2.0.0.0. This precompiled version is located in the CurrentVersion folder. The update location in the precompiled version does not match the location to where you extracted the Quick Start. As a result, after successfully updating to version 2.0.0.0, subsequent check for update attempts will result in a message that the update location can not be found. To correct this in your Quick Start, change the Update Location on the Update Controller within the Visual Studio project to match the Update Location of the Make Update project.
Extracting the Quick Starts
The Quick Starts are packaged with the install of AppLife Update. You can extract any of the Quick Starts into a new folder by selecting a Quick Start from the Start Page or the Help > Quick Starts menu.
Once extracted, the extraction location will contain a completed Visual Studio project, a corresponding AppLife Update project, and an updates folder with a compiled update ready to go. You can open the Visual Studio project and the AppLife update project file to view the completed quick start. This solution can act as a reference as you read through this accompanying documentation.