AutoUpdater.NET VS filediff

It's not a website, it's a project.

You could also maybe check out AutoUpdater.NET as another possibility.

Aa others mentioned, it just more common to have an auto-updater mechanism built-in in your app. Check out AutoUpdater.NET which periodically check the server for new versions, download it in background and allow you to present a "update ready" button to the user that quickly restart the app to the new version when they are ready to apply it. A bit like the Chrome or Discord update ready buttons.

Good catch. Hmm, looks like Squirrel might be a no go. Oh well. My examples were not heavily researched. Just something to point in a starter direction. At a glance this looks promising too: https://github.com/ravibpatel/AutoUpdater.NET

Libraries like https://github.com/ravibpatel/AutoUpdater.NET, and plenty of others. This may not fit your needs, but maybe it does.

But it AutoUpdater.NET(https://github.com/ravibpatel/AutoUpdater.NET) does quite the same. It only looks at your own server instead of github. You should be able to get an idea of how it works and how to implement it using github instead.

I have a few desktop apps that uses AutoUpdater.NET to update the app on startup, as well as one app that's linked to a mapped drive. Since both apps are self-contained, it's always been a pain to update them - you either have to copy the entire 150 MB publish directory to your update location, or you have to pick and choose which binaries were updated, which you'd then push into a ZIP folder.

So, how do you compare publish folders then? With filediff! Instead of comparing bytes, filediff instead compares the .deps.json files between update folders using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyModel. It then only extracts binaries which either do not exist in the old publish directory, or have an assemblyVersion or fileVersion different from binaries in the publish directory! After that, it does a fast byte-comparison for all the non-binary files, and put the extracts into a ZIP folder.