Making Patches

[Lev Blaivas]

I have my program set-up on the client computer and I want to be able to apply patches to DLLs of the application. Right now I am making a merge module of that DLL and an installation .msi package. It works with individual DLLs but it doesn’t seem to work when I try to patch several DLLs at once. I tried putting them into separate merge module projects and one installation but it's still causing problems, and gives me the “Two or more objects have the same target location” warning.
Another Problem is that the patch is visible in the add/remove programs and uninstalling it deletes the DLLs and obviously ‘breaks’ the application.

Can any one please tell me how can I overcome these problems, or is there another way to patch the application offline?

 

[Pete (BSC)]

Possible Solution?

I like Setup and Deployment b/c I can package up everything into 1 setup and I like the ClickOnce for the auto updates; but, I've been jumping through hoops to get ClickOnce deployment to work on IE6 and I ran across something that sounds promissing. Check out the last post in:

http://www.vbdotnetforums.com/showthread.php?p=72286#post72286 regarding DDay.Update.

 

[Lev Blaivas]

Automatic updates is not an option for me because most of the patches will be client-specific, and I dont' want other clients do get access to it.

 

[Pete (BSC)]

There has to be a property

I've only built 2 setups so far using "Setup and Deployment" project, so I'm still figuring stuff out (if you haven't seen my post on ClickOnce deployment ) In other setup packages, there is an uninstall section where you can specify "Never remove" or "Shared/System file" or something to that affect.

This is a tough situation...
1. You install the application (1st release)
2. Then install a patch
3. Uninstall the patch would have to restore 1st release files or leave the shared file; but, that could cause your app to fail. Unless you have functions specific to each version.

DoSomething
DoSomething_v2

Keep updating this thread, I'd like to know what you end up doing. I'm sure I'll run into this roadblock down the road too!