Making use of the shadow copy feature of .NET is not a bad idea. It will allow you to update your assemblies without having to exit the application BUT you will need to restart the application in order to run the updated version. Shadow copy will simply allow you to overwrite the assemblies and nothing else.
Note that you cannot enable shadow copy on the default AppDomain
. This means that you will need a loader that will create the AppDomain
, and execute your application. Have a look at this answer for the steps you need to take and for a simple implementation.
If all you want to do is allow updates to be installed without having to exit the application then this is the simplest approach I can think of.
You should also have a look at Microsoft's ClickOnce technology. It solves a lot of the common problems of deploying and updating .NET GUI applications.