I'm not a .Net developer by trade, but I've done a (very) little bit. Within the .Net installer builder (at least with newer versions of Visual Studio), when y

I'm not a .Net developer by trade, but I've done a (very) little bit. Within the .Net installer builder (at least with newer versions of Visual Studio), when you build your installer, it has an option to supply the 'installer URL'. If you do this, your application will check for a product update (I believe) every launch, and prompt the user to download and install the update if available. I don't think it's amazingly sophisticated, in that it just checks the URL for files containing meta data with newer version numbers, but that's probably all you need in regards to your first point. As for piracy protection, I really wouldn't worry too much about it.