Upgrade Wizard: auto-upgrades and more

by The Telerik VSXTeam Blog | Comments 4

Developers (yours truly included) often hate it when there is a need to deal with an external tool to accomplish a simple task. The upgrade process of RadControls seems such a task – you need to start a browser, open the Telerik website, login to your account, navigate to the Downloads section, download the installer and run it. Even more - if you want to keep updated you need to either check your RSS reader or e-mail, or refresh the Downloads page when you’re eagerly waiting for a new version.

 

One of the new features in the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX and RadControls for Silverlight installations for the Q3 release is the auto-upgrade utility provided by the Visual Studio Extensions. We added a special webservice in the Telerik website to support that.

One of the aspects of the auto-upgrades is the automatic check for a new available version. The check happens once a day when you open a RadControls Web Application in your Visual Studio. See for yourself:

NewVersionAvailableNotification

 

The other aspect is the retrieval of the actual new version. Once you are notified that a new version is detected, you need to just provide your Telerik site credentials and you get the assemblies and the accompanying files downloaded and extracted to your hard drive*. Check these screenshots:

UpgradeWizard_DownloadLatestVersion

UpgradeWizard_DownloadLatestVersion_InProgress

 

Once retrieved, the new version is available for an upgrade:

UpgradeWizard_SelectDistribution

Here is important information I’d like to stress on: When you finish applying the upgrade, you’ll change the RadControls references in your project. However, having the Visual Studio Toolbox populated with the RadControls you have installed, if you drag and drop a control to your page, you could accidentally revert the references to the older version. The next page in the Upgrade Wizard allows you to prevent such an accident:

UpgradeWizard_UpdateToolbox

And finally, to be able to restore any breaking changes, you can automatically create a backup of your project and get a log:

UpgradeWizard_CreateABackup

UpgradeWizard_UpgradeLog

 

Notes:

  • There are two limitations we haven’t covered yet:
    (RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX only) In contrast to the installer, the auto-upgrade functionality does not add the Telerik.Web.Design assembly to the GAC. While technically possible, there are several side issues we would need to implement to have the auto-upgrades support the GAC addition.
  • The Visual Studio Extensions do not upgrade themselves for the time being. This is one of the major stuff the VSXTeam will be working in the near future.

 

* The download includes all the files needed for a web project – assemblies, script/skin files, RadSpell dictionaries, RadEditor dialogs. Documentation, Live Examples and Visual Studio Extensions are not included.

,
Developer

Posted in: radcontrols-for-silverlight radcontrols-for-wpf radcontrols-for-aspnet-ajax radcontrols-for-winforms radcontrols-for-windows-phone-showcase aspnet-mvc

4 Comments

Amon-Ra Mackie
This feature is cool.  However, it would also be beneficial to me if this feature was available for any Telerik distribution, be it WPF, Silverlight, Reporting, etc.  How about a "Check for Updates" executable that I could use to download updates just by providing my credentials.  The app could download the updates to a folder I specify in the background.  While something like this may not update the projects associated with these assmeblies, I wouldn't have to log on a download each distribution separately.
Erjan Gavalji
A good one, Amon!
We are working on providing Visual Studio Extensions for the rest of our products as well.

Your suggestion is a very good one indeed, we have something in mind in the long term, but we haven't finalized the research and we don't have a strict decision yet.

Cheers,
Erjan
Aakansha

hello Telerik Team,

While upgradation of Telerik radcontrols for ASP.NET ajax i reach one point where i seek your guidance. In some blogs i have read that the Telerik RadControl Upgrade Wizard simply replaces the existing dll with the Updated dll. So my question is, does make any difference when i will directly replace the existing dll's with new dll's?
so if this is true that "Upgrade Wizard" simply replaces the older version dll with newer version dll then instead of using "Upgrade Wizard" can manually we replace the older dll with newer dll directly?

Apart from replacing the upgraded dll files with the previous dll's, does Telerik upgrade wizard provides any additional advantages?

Thanks,
Aakansha

Andrey
Hi Aakansha,
The Upgrade Wizard does not do anything out of the ordinary. Its purpose is to automate all of the manual steps you would normally do, relieving you of that duty. Depending on the product it can update web.config files, update project resources such as images, globalization resources, etc.
Having that in mind, there is nothing stopping you from performing the upgrade manually.
All the best,
Andrey

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