Just Released - Updater Application Block on .NET 2.0 - What!!!????

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Check the download section of the updater Community workspace for a new release of the Updater Aplication Block that has been ported to the .NET 2.0 framework and adjusted to use the latest version of Enterprise Library (January 2006 Release).

Of course ClickOnce remains our peferred technology for managing updates on Smart Clients, but there are scenarios where ClickOnce is not applicable (like Windows Services).

We've received a lot of feedback from many community members (like ClickOnce guru Brian Noyes) and we've decided to port UAB into .NET 2.0 to help customers working with these scenarios.

We also took the opportunity to fix a few things, like resuming failed downloads.

No new major features have been included though.

What is in the release:

  • The code compiles on .Net 2.0 of course :-)
  • Updater Application Block uses Enterprise Library 2.0 (Jan 2006) for the configuration
  • Quickstarts migrated to support the new configuration system
  • Breaking changes only related to configuration and not the Updater API
  • Bits Downloader now handles broken downloads gracefully (this is a fix to the original implementation)
  • UpdaterTask serialization fixed. There was a bug on the net 1.1 version of UAB related to the partial update scenario. When some files were removed from the manifest, the UAB serializes the UpdaterTask with the original version of the files. This caused the ApplicationDeployProcessor to fail.
    Partial update scenario fixed.
  • The algorithms that might be used to calculate file hashes are non-keyed hash algorithms like: MD5; RIPEMD160; SHA1; SHA256; SHA384; SHA512
  • Manifest tool fixed to correctly support salt enabled hashes
  • The solution assumes you have EntLib installed in your machine to the default location (c:\program Files\...)

There is no Enterprise Library 2.0 Design time (that's an excercise to the reader), there are still .NET 2.0 compilation warnings and we've only ported the C# version.

As usual, feedback is very much welcome!