Do you know what the user experience should be like?

Updated by Igor Goldobin 1 year ago. See history

123

You should have a standard menu item "Check for Updates" in the Help menu. Here are a couple of examples of Check for Updates results:

Image

❌ Figure: Bad example - Skype does a good job, with a green tick and simple message. The actual version number would have made it more complete

Image

❌ Figure: Bad example - Snagit has horrible UI (red text when it is not an error and Hyperlinks without underlines), however the link to the latest features is not bad

Image

✅ Figure: Good example - SSW Code Auditor has a great UI (using the freely available component in .NET Toolkit)

More Information

If you implement this code from the SSW Toolkit, you will get this UI:

Figure 1: Help | Check for Updates opens the Updater form

Figure 2: Confirmation that they already have the latest version

Figure 3: The simple prompt to upgrade when a new version is available

Figure 4: Showing the upgrading progress

Figure 5: Restarting the application is required because the new version will not take affect until quit and launch the app again

Categories

Rules to Better Windows Forms Applications - ClickOnce
acknowledgements
related rules