How Does Your Software Company Push Out Updates?

[Sam Bahmanyar]

Question for software companies out there: What mechanism(s) do you use to push out your updates?

Thanks

[David Filip]

I use to work on desktop app that have about 500k - 1M active users each day. We have build our own update system, each app checks if there is new version daily and then download it and install update automatically.

To prevent cases that wrong update kill whole user base we have users divided to groups = distributions. I think that there were about 20 of them, from user count about 2k to 100k+. We pushed updates to smaller ones first and test waters, then update rest of user base.

Everything was our own technology: web service for version checking, build system and some download servers.

[Sam Bahmanyar]

Impressive! Any ready-made systems out there that you'd recommend?

[Matt Richards]

When a user runs our software, we notify them of their version and the current version available. If they want the update, they have to come to the web site and download it manually.

[David Filip]

Sam: we spent some time evaluting ready-made systems, but I can't remmember any and we do not find them very useful for us.

[Richard Watson]

It's really not hard to do your own thing and then you have freedom to modify how it works. I use an HTTP get to the server to fetch the latest version, alert the user, if they select update I run an external app that pulls the installer down and runs it. Now I can separate between different streams, e.g. beta or normal user.

[Sam Bahmanyar]

Thank you all for your replies!

[Maksym Shostak]

Consider Upgrading .NET Framework-based Applications section in Deploying .NET Framework-Based Applications

[Jeff Widman]

Is this downloadable software or SaaS or purely a web app through the browser??

(These days, when people say software, the lines are a bit blurry...)