Checking for new versions of WASP

I’ve got quite a few plans for expanding the functionality that WASP provides. Ideally it should showcase all of the major options available with The Server Framework; so pretty soon I’ll be adding UDP support, hosting plugins written in managed code, providing secure TCP connections using SSL, etc. Plus I’m sure that some bugs will be shaken out as users push the system in ways that I haven’t anticipated and so haven’t tested. So, expect there to be updates coming along.

WASP can automatically check for updates by reading a web page at www.ServerFramework.com. By default it does this once a week. You can disable this by adding a DisableUpdateCheck value to the instance node of your config file and setting it to “true”. This will prevent WASP from automatically checking for updates. Alternatively you can change how often WASP checks by adding a CheckForUpdatesEvery value; valid values for this are “Day”, “Week” and “Month”.

WASP will remember if it’s not up to date and remind you each time it starts, you can stop it doing this by adding a RemindOnStartIfNotUpToDate value to the instance node and setting it to “false”.

All of the details of what the update check is doing and the results of the check are logged to the log file.

If you disable automatic update checks then you can check for updates manually by running WASP with the /checkForUpdates command line parameter. This will log the results to the log and display a message box telling you how things went. If you want to automate this process and run the test from a script then you can run WASP with /noMessages /checkForUpdates which will not display the message box and will return an exit code of 1 if an update is available and 0 if WASP is up to date.

During the update check WASP requests a web page, http://wasp.ServerFramework.com/WASP-LatestVersion.html with a user agent string that identifies the version of WASP that is making the call and the version of the operating system that it is running on.