Harry Finocchiaro

I haven’t made a post about EmptyGee in a long time, but it still being developed.

In the latest release, I made some nice improvements to the dragging and dropping on the battlefield. You’ll now see an outline of where the card will be dropped, which also works when moving multiple cards. I also added the ability to check for application updates so people don’t need to constantly poll my website for changes (all 2 people lol).

Since I created a new installer type, which you can read about below, I recommend uninstalling any previous versions of EmptyGee before installing the new one. You can download the new installer here: http://emptygee.googlecode.com/files/EmptyGeeInstaller.exe. I also created a website for EmptyGee, and a forum for support.

More on the updating process after the jump…

Here’s the tl;dr on checking for updates: Checking for updates is quite the pain in the ass if you’ve never done it before. There are so many ways to accomplish it, but choosing the right one for you is the hard part. I started off investigating ClickOnce since I already use VS2008; however, that proved to be disastrous and ugly. I moved into trying to create a bootstrapper application that did the updating process, but that ended with the installer always telling the user to reboot. I could get around that by packaging the bootstrapper separately, but I liked how EmptyGee was all packaged together in a small installer.

Thats when I turned to the idea of the main application checking for new versions and running the installer. At this point, the installer would tell the user that they needed to close EmptyGee in order to perform the update. It’s not the cleanest way I could have done it, but it works how I need it to.

During this whole process I decided to switch to Inno Installer, which I have experience with already. Inno is an amazing installer utility and I think my installer now looks 10 times better.

As it stands, EmptyGee will check it’s website to see what the latest version should be and compare that to what version it’s running. If there is an update available, it will ask the user what they want to do. If they choose to install it now, EmptyGee will download the installer and run it. You do the rest of the work.

Enjoy the new version!