As an exercise, I created my own update app. During idle moments, the app will monitor a directory for updates. If an update is found, it will display a message. If the user chooses to install the update, the app will spawn an "update" process and shutdown itself down. The spawned update process will archive the previous EXE, copy the new EXE file from the directory, restart the main app, and shut itself down.
This is for an internal use application. I suppose the same process could be used for one that is delivered to a customer. Your installer would essentially be an unzip operation into an updates folder, which would then kick-off the update process in the main app.
This works well for a simple EXE replacement and minor file operations. I suppose it could be explanded to include running additional installers as part of the process.
aputman
