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Hello,

Starting with 16.9 version of Advanced Installer, the Updater has the ability to display custom messages to your users. This feature may be of great help when you want to reach your users either be it with great offers for the software, campaign discounts or just latest blog article. It doesn't matter, you decide.

For those who are not that familiar with the Updater , please note that Advanced Updater is an executable tool whose roles are to check for updates, inform the user of their presence and offer to download and install them. After launching the Updater, it checks if a newer version of the application exists.

Here is how the notification looks like:



In order to enable auto-updates capability in your installer, you can check the Configuring auto-updates for a Windows application video.

The How the Updater works diagram illustrates the steps of how an application is upgraded from one version to the next when using the Advanced Updater.

Sample projects can be downloaded from here.

How to send custom messages

Updates Configuration Project has a new tab available, the Notification. Here you can type your custom message.



Another speficic setting that is recommended for the Updater is to add the AppId. AppID field is mandatory for update notifications. On some Windows 10 versions the notifications will not be displayed if no AppId is specified.



Now, the most convenient way to find the AppId is by installing the app and then run the following command line in PowerShell:


The notification is sent based on the settings provided in the Notification view.

In case you are testing the Updater and how the mesages are sent, then you need to know that the a message is sent only once. If you want to see the message once again for testing purposes you need to clear up registries. The Updater stores this infor in the Just delete the {E49DD1F8-0F07-4E0B-863A-644973E09FF6} entry and you should be able to see the message once again. If the message does not appear in the Notification center, please check the Windows settings to make sure that you have notification enabled:



Note that the notification will be displayed (only once) when the Updater is triggered, be it automatically from a schedule task or manually from a desktop shortcut. This feature is available starting with Windows 7.

You can download a sample project that usses the Notification feature from here.

As you can see, the structure of the updates configuration file contains a new entry:

At any given time you can edit this updates.txt file and add a new message. The Updater will display one message at a time and only once.

So, if you want to add a new message, just add a new entry and upload the updates.exe file on your server. When the Updater will be triggered, it will see that a new message is available and will display it to the user. e.g.:
For any questions your may have, please let us know.

Best regards,
Dan