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Product Overview
Visual Patch 2.0 is a fast and efficient solution for software developers and content distributors who need to create software patches. It features state-of-the-art binary differencing and compression algorithms, combined with a powerful fullhistory patching engine.
With its sophisticated yet straightforward user interface, Visual Patch 2.0 simplifies software version management, turning the otherwise complicated task of managing point releases into a fast and automated process. There is no better way to make professional-quality, fullhistory binary patches for software and other electronic content.
Features
High Performance Binary Differencing - State-ofthe- art delta compression algorithms developed specifically for their impressive speed characteristics, including gigabyte-sized files. Create smaller patches for larger files faster.
Full-History Patching - Gives developers full control over which versions can be patched with a single executable. Full-history patching means you can update any version of your software to the latest release with one patch file.
Sophisticated Version Management - Makes it easy to manage software releases. You can quickly and easily add, remove and organize product versions, and see all of the important details about your files.
Customizable User Interface - A library of over twenty different screens makes it easy to control the user interface of your patches. There are pre-built layouts to handle just about any task you can imagine, and it's easy to adjust them to fit your needs exactly.
Fully Compatible - Patches created with Visual Patch are compatible with every Windows operating system from Windows 95 to XP and beyond.
Advanced Skinning System - Choose from dozens of pre-made themes (skins) for your user interface, or make your own by customizing everything from colors to background images and fonts.
Interactive or Silent Operation - Supports the creation of both fully-interactive "wizard based" patches or completely automatic patches that operate silently without displaying any user interface at all.
Rollback Protection - Patches can back up any modified files and automatically 'roll back' to the originals if an error occurs or a user aborts the patching process.
Project Wizard Quick-Start - Spend five minutes with the easy to use Project Wizard and come away with a complete and ready to build project.
Powerful Scripting Engine - A powerful scripting engine with more than 250 highlevel actions gives unprecedented control over the software patching system, and features everything from registry editing and file copying to web file downloads and much more.
100% Data Integrity - Patches are only applied to the exact files they're intended for. Using a combination of 128-bit MD5 hashing, CRC-32 checksums and industry standard data encryption protocols, applications and data are kept safe from unauthorized use, transmission errors and other threats.
Advanced System Editing - Advanced systemchanging capabilities are built right in. Query the Registry, modify INI files, perform file searches, interact with web scripts, explore folders, delete and rename files, and more.
International Language Support - Integrated language selection is built into all screen dialogs, making it easy to create multilingual user interfaces and modify existing translations at any time.
Lightweight and Self-Contained - Creates selfextracting executable patches that are compact, optimized, and completely self-contained, with no external dependencies or extras to distribute.
FREE Technical Support - Free web/email technical support is available, as well as cost-effective consulting and integration services. The software ships with a comprehensive help file and a 285-page user's guide in PDF format.
Benefits of Software Patching
The role of patches in the software deployment cycle is to get already-installed software up to date after it becomes outdated. Patching technology offers numerous benefits over simply redistributing new versions of the original software in whole form.
The first and most fundamental benefit is a dramatic reduction in file size, which leads to reduced bandwidth and storage costs. Because they only contain the data that has changed from one version to another, patches can be much smaller than a full installer or compressed archive. Especially in situations where large data files are involved, the savings are often dramatic, with typical bandwidth reductions between 90% and 99%.
Having less data to transmit means that updates can be sent and received faster, which means less time is spent waiting for updates, improving the user's update experience and making automatic "background" updates feasible.
Binary differencing also makes the update process more secure. Transmitting only tiny portions of a file in a format that can't be used without the original greatly reduces the risk of unauthorized use.
Competitive Position
Some tools claim to support large-file patching, but they process large files so slowly that it really isn't feasible to use them for that purpose. Visual Patch uses a unique binary differencing algorithm that was developed to process very large files as quickly as possible. It does this while also achieving the best compression performance possible on all file sizes, large and small.
For example, in benchmark testing Visual Patch was able to create a patch for a 1.2 GB data file in under 3 minutes, whereas the nearest competitor we tested required more than 70 minutes to process the data on the same system. Some of the competing tools we tested were not even able to process such a large file, and either failed completely or were still processing after more than 24 hours.
Remarkably, Visual Patch achieves its speed without sacrificing performance, creating patches that compare favorably in size to patches created by other tools. In fact, Visual Patch's speed permits additional size optimizations that are not feasible with other tools. For example, it can automatically perform multiple passes with different settings in order to find the optimal parameters for each particular file-and still manage to do so in less time than competing tools require for a single pass!
Visual Patch combines its advanced binary differencing engine with an intelligent full-history patching system. Fullhistory patches can update any older version to the latest release, allowing multiple versions to be patched with the same file. Only having one file to download simplifies the patching process. End users don't have to worry about finding multiple patches and applying them in the correct order, as they would with other, less sophisticated patching tools.
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