UAB

A few days ago a customer called us with a specific problem: they have developed a pretty big application with Windows Forms and MBI (a framework for building business layers), now that they were about going live they needed to solve the problem of having relatively frequent updates of their Windows Forms client. After reviewing their scenarios, it was clear that the most adequate (or less troublesome) solution was to use the Updater Application Block. It's interesing how in situations like this it's always tempting to write your own solution, especially because the use of components like UAB is not trivial and requires several hours to understand well enough. Luckily, for UAB it helped me a lot the webcast that Chris Kinsman did in August on the subject. Having the source code was also helpful as one need of my customer was that the manifest file didn't get deleted after being downloaded from the deploy server: it took us half an hour to find the place inside UAB where this was done and parameterize the code with an entry in the configuration file. In retrospect, the 6 or 8 hours that we had to invest were far less than those we would've used in writing our own solution; that is why I suggest you to use the code blocks: the effort that takes to learn them usually pays handsomely.