Glossary

• Application directory/Local directory/Root path: the directory in which your application is installed, e.g. C:\Program Files\MyApp
• Cache directory: a path that holds the temporary patch files while applying a patch. Its contents are automatically cleaned after a successful patch. It is located at {Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.LocalApplicationData)}\SimplePatchToolDls\{PROJECT_NAME}
• Repair patch: a patch method that checks each file in the local directory one by one and downloads the out-of-date files from the server
• Incremental patch: a patch method that can update the app from a specific version to a specific version (e.g. from 1.0 to 1.1). So, a 1.0->1.1 incremental patch can be applied only if the installed app's version is 1.0. Similarly, if there are two incremental patches (1.0->1.1 and 1.1->1.2) and the app's version is 1.0, these patches are applied consecutively to update the app to the 1.2 version. An incremental patch holds binary diffs of the files that have changed in that version
• Binary diff: stores the changes between two versions of the same file. It is usually more efficient to download a small diff file rather than downloading the whole file
• Self patching: when enabled, patcher does not modify the files in the application directory but rather apply the patches to the cache directory. After all patches are applied there, application terminates itself and launches the self patcher. Self patching is the way to go when e.g. you want the launcher to patch itself, because apps can't patch themselves in conventional ways while they are still running
• Self patcher: a tiny executable that is responsible for moving the self-patched files from the cache directory to the application directory and deleting any obsolete files afterwards
• Obsolete file: files in the application directory that are not part of the up-to-date version of the app. These files are deleted after the application is patched
• VersionInfo: an xml file that holds all the necessary information to update an app: hashes, file sizes and download urls of the files in the version and a brief information about each incremental patch
• PatchInfo: an xml file that holds detailed information about an incremental patch. Before applying an incremental patch, SimplePatchTool fetches the corresponding PatchInfo