Royal Apps

Hi Rohan,

I can hear you loud and clear and I really wish it would be much easier. One thing I can tell you it's not as easy as it sounds. Building something like that from scratch is a huge undertaking. We looked at https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows and https://github.com/vslavik/winsparkle which are frameworks which could improve update size and handling but during our tests we stumbled upon several issues:

* stability: these libraries work well most of the time but when it doesn't, it's really painful to debug, diagnose and get a fix in

* open source: while open source is mostly a good thing and I'm happy to support open source projects wherever I can, looking at squirrel alone, is not really reassuring. Not sure if the project is "dead" already but they are desperately looking for contributors

* enterprise support: a lot of our customers are enterprise customer and they rely on good mechanism to deploy software in their infrastructure. MSI is still the best and most stable technology for that. The other frameworks make it hard in these environments.

With .NET 5 and later we now also have the opportunity to create self-containing deployments. Which mean, we are not dependent on any .NET Framework installation on the client machine. We had several issues in the past because of a corrupt Framework installation or some weird issues where the app just wouldn't start or behave because of the version installed on the client was slightly different than the version we compiled against.

The downside of self-contained deployment is the increased package size but the upside of using .NET 5 in Royal TS V6 is that the "optimizing" part is a thing of the past. Installation (once downloaded) should be much quicker now (essentially a file copy).

I'm really sorry we don't have a better solution right now but if there's a better alternative which works with all our requirements, I'm happy to switch to something more efficient.

cheers,
Stefan

Looks like there was an issue with the review process and we didn't get any notification. I re-submitted the store listing for the latest version. Hopefully it will be online soon. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Sorry about that. I've just submitted the latest V6 release to winget packages repo. Once the PR is accepted, it should appear in winget.

Regards,
Stefan

Glad to hear that the winget manifest works. 

As an FYI: we decided to only push release versions (no beta releases) to the winget feed and we will not differentiate major versions. We will probably also pull the beta and versioning from chocolatey in the near future.

For now, I've submitted the PR with the new package manifest manually but I've also integrated the submission in our CI/CD pipeline. Future releases will automatically update the manifests and submit the pull request. How long it takes to get it merged, I don't know.

Yes, the MSI is from our server when you use winget but we don't maintain the package itself to be registered with winget. This seems to be community driven but we do plan to update packages there as well in the future.

There's also an explanation why we leave the old version installed when a new major version is release. We actually did that in the past but it upset a lot of people because a new major version also means a new license is required and only customers with an active maintenance get that for free. We got a lot of complaints from users who needed to pay that this behavior is bad and leaves them with a "broken" piece of software because they can't work anymore. Many users don't know that they also can download older versions and it caused a lot of confusion. This is why we decided to keep the old version on the box.

Regards,
Stefan