Of course this is possible, but you should understand that the Web is pure client-server, so it won't give you any notification unless you program the deployment process this way, only if you can access the programming of this process. That said, if you want to download newer versions from the site you are not supporting, you will need to poll data from time to time. To do it, you can use the class
System.Net.HttpWebRequest and get the news in
System.Net.HttpWebResponse:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.httpwebrequest.aspx[
^],
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.webresponse.aspx[
^].
Please see my past answers:
How to get the data from another site[
^],
get specific data from web page[
^].
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping[
^].
If the Web development on the site used for deployment is accessible to you, you can do a bit better and develop some subscription-based system (see also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish%E2%80%93subscribe_pattern[
^]).
The most natural way of doing this in a Web application would be implementing of the user membership system and authentication. The user account data can store the recent status of the user's updates and track it. When a user is authenticated, you can compare this data with latest software status and inform the user: "nothing new" or "{0} updates are available", something like that. On the client side, the client code can automatically check it up, using the approach I described above.
—SA
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