diff --git a/src/utils/UpdateNotifier.ts b/src/utils/UpdateNotifier.ts
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8357a9d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/src/utils/UpdateNotifier.ts
@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@
+'use strict';
+
+import { window } from 'vscode';
+import { ExtensionManifestReader } from './ManifestUtils';
+
+let req = require('request');
+let semver = require('semver');
+
+export function checkForUpdates() {
+	let manifestReader: ExtensionManifestReader = new ExtensionManifestReader('DotJoshJohnson.xml');
+	let currentVersion = manifestReader.version;
+	
+	// use the GitHub api to determine the latest released version
+	let url = 'https://api.github.com/repos/DotJoshJohnson/vscode-xml/releases/latest';
+	let options = {
+		url: url,
+		headers: {
+			// the GitHub API requires a user agent header
+			// we are spoofing a Chrome user agent string here
+			'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2490.86 Safari/537.36'
+		}
+	}
+	
+	req(options, (error, response, body) => {
+		if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
+			let release = JSON.parse(body);
+			let latestVersion = release.name.substring(1); // the telease/tag is prefixed with a "v"
+			
+			if (!release.draft && semver.gt(latestVersion, currentVersion)) {
+				window.showInformationMessage(`Version ${latestVersion} of the ${manifestReader.displayName} extension is available.`);
+			}
+		}
+	});
+}
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