wum

So the XNA Content Assistant is largely finished and I wanted to distribute it using some kind of web update model, to make it easier for all of you to update the Assistant in the future. So I built a little update functionality into the Assistant under the Visual Studio ClickOnce model.

ClickOnce is really neat and very easy to use, but unfortunately for the XNA Content Assistant it is unacceptable. The problem is that you can't effectively launch a ClickOnce application from another program e.g. via Process.Start while passing command line arguments. At best, you can submit a query string to a web-based application, but having the Assistant be entirely web based is not acceptable. The Content Assistant must be installed on the local machine and must be callable via command line with arguments.

Therefore I abandoned the ClickOnce model and for the past couple days I've been crafting a web update system. This is something I will require anyway, to allow updates to my future XNA applications, so it's somewhat of an inevitable project.

The Web Updater does its best to be somewhat generic; in a nutshell it just needs to know the URL of your application's "wum.xml" file (Web Updater Manifest), a simple xml file which describes the current files available on the update server (name, size, last update, etc). The Web Updater grabs the wum and checks it against whatever application it's updating on the local machine, and updates files as necessary.

To that end, now I'm in the process of writing a companion tool for wum publishing called the Wummer. The Wummer is for developers, we point it at our Release folder (or, whatever you want to publish), and the Wummer uses an IO.CompressionStream to publish your application to your web host as .gz files, creating the wum.xml file for you (an otherwise tedious task).

So I've been pretty busy working on all this lately, juggling work and 3 of my own little mini-projects! I believe these will all be helpful tools though and I hope to have them finished up pretty soon.