TrueUpdate questions...

[arthurb]

Hi. I am reviewing TrueUpdate as a candidate for use with software that we develop for a third party. One feature that I am looking for is the ability to download only those components required to bring the current installed version up to the mose recent version.

TrueUpdate is missing a number of features (registering DLLs and updating in-use files) that are commonly available in setup programs. This makes it difficult to use TrueUpdate alone without a patch or setup program.

I thought about using VisualPatch, but the problem with VisualPatch is that the user would have to download a complete patch set and not just the most recent patches. Many of the end-users only have 56k modems and we need to minimize the size of the download. It would be cool if VisualPatch could generate n different patch files, one for each of the versions of the program. These patch files would contain only those files required to bring that version up to date. Keeping track of n different VisualPatch project files is just asking for problems.

Any suggestions on how to achieve my goal?

Regards,

Arthur

[Brett]

Arthur,

You are right in that TrueUpdate is not designed to really do the dirty work of installing files. It is there to facilitate the download and running of installs/patches that you have created. There are incremental patching utilities out there that will patch from one version to another for you if you don't need a full-history patcher. Either way, TrueUpdate can easily detect which specific versiuon the user has and then download and apply one or more patches.