WinSparkle is a plug-and-forget software update library for Windows applications. It is heavily inspired by the Sparkle framework for OS X written by Andy Matuschak and others, to the point of sharing the same updates format (appcasts) and having very similar user interface.

See http://winsparkle.org for more information about WinSparkle.

Documentation: wiki and the winsparkle.h header.

The easiest way to use WinSparkle is to download the prebuilt WinSparkle.dll binary. It doesn't have any extra dependencies (not even msvcr*.dll) and is compatible with all Windows compilers.

If you prefer to build WinSparkle yourself, you can do so. You'll have to compile from a git checkout; some of the dependencies are included as git submodules.

Check the sources out and initialize the submodules:

$ git clone git://github.com/vslavik/winsparkle.git
$ cd winsparkle
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

To compile the library, just open WinSparkle.sln (or the one corresponding to your compiler version) solution and build it.

At the moment, projects for Visual C++ 2008, 2010 and 2012 are provided, so you'll need that (Express edition suffices). In principle, there's nothing in the code preventing it from being compiled by other compilers.

Download the sources archive and have a look at the examples/ folder.

If you want to stay at the bleeding edge and use the latest, not yet released, version of WinSparkle, you can get its sources from public repository. WinSparkle uses git and and the sources are hosted on GitHub at http://github.com/vslavik/winsparkle

WinSparkle uses submodules for some dependencies, so you have to initialize them after checking the tree out:

$ git clone git://github.com/vslavik/winsparkle.git
$ cd winsparkle
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

Then compile WinSparkle as described above; no extra steps are required.