I'm looking for a way to allow potential customers to try my application before they buy it.
The product is a windows forms application that requires an SQL Server database to operate.
Although I have a functional demo that the customer can install on their network, I want to make it easier for them by have them "play" with it at my environment.
I remember Microsoft had (has?) something similar. I was testing Visual Studio a few years ago in a virtual environment where I was connecting to a server at Microsoft.
They setup the environment this way so when a user logs off after using it rollback his actions. Or to explain it better: when a user logins it starts with a new, clean environment.
So any projects I've created testing Visual Studio were lost after I logged off.
Any suggestions?
Thanks.
Some solutions that come to mind:
Provide remote access
You could provide access to a running instance of your application via some sort of remote connection protocol, e.g. via RDP or via VNC.
For example, there is a Java VNC client which can run as a Java applet; you could put that on a webpage and have it connect to a VNC session you host on your servers.
Or use Windows Terminal Server, and allow connection via RDP.
Both solutions of course have the drawback that people need to open the appropriate ports, if they are behind a firewall. There might be ways around that, however (e.g. you can run VNC over HTTP).
VM image
A completely different solution: Provide a ready-to-run VM image (for VMWare, VirtualBox or similar) of your application, including server and everything. You would need a demo version of your app though, plus getting redistribution rights for all the proprietary components (Windows OS, SQL server) might get hairy.
Offer videos
Often people do not really need to actually use the app; they are mainly interested to see how it works. So maybe it is enough to host videos of the app in operation. That allows you to put in some advertising for your features, and lets you show the users what they might miss when testing on their own.
Related
I'm looking for a platform with Web UI access that allows me to do the following:
Maintain a list of computers and add / remove based on their IP address.
Provide the SSH information for each computer machine.
Monitor if the machines are up ( ping ? )
Restart the machines with a web UI using the ssh information on the backend of the application.
I'm close to start making such an app myself since I can't seem to find anything close to that in the internet. Any clues if such an application exists ?
You might want to take a look at MeshCentral: https://meshcentral.com/ - you can add systems that you are managing and do some remote operations.
http://info.meshcentral.com/: Meshcentral is open source and is both a peer-to-peer technology with a wide array of uses and web service that is targeted for remote monitoring and management of computers and devices. Users can manage all their devices from a single web site, no matter the location of the computers or if they are behind routers or proxies.
If you are looking for source code you could take a look at the "Open Manageabilty Developer's Toolkit" http://opentools.homeip.net/open-manageability. This tool was built for managing systems with Intel Active Management Technology, but it does a lot of what you are looking for. You can download the source and see if you can use any of it if you decide to write your own UI.
Here's the situation. I developed a simple examination system with registration forms. I used VB.Net as the programming language. I haven't tried manual coding for my problem yet.
Anyway this is a project for the company from which I am an intern.
The plan is to get every client pc to have this examination/registration application and this application will send the personal info and the score to a central database(server pc).
I used MySql as the dbms and developed the application on the same machine which means that the Database server I used is only on the local host.
Now I was about to try to implement the application to one client pc(as a beta test) and installed the necessary files(.net framework) and I also installed MySQL Server(and workbench) in the server pc.
When I run the application in the client PC it didn't detect/connect to the ServerPC's MySQL server instance and therefore was not able to record the dummy values I input in the client application. Take note I changed the connection string of my app to point to the ip address of the serverPC.
Now my questions are the following:
1)What have I done wrong?
2)Should I install the MySQL Server(and Workbench) to every ClientPC so that I can create a server instance that uses the REMOTE HOST option and configure it such that it will connect to the SERVERPC's Database?
3)How should I setup the server so it gives access to the application I installed in all clientPCs?
I'm pretty new to VB.net and mostly learned from internet sources. I haven't tried manual coding. Mainly because the tools in VB.net are slightly easy to understand thanks to intellisense,the drag and drop tools and also the help topics.
Anyway I hope anyone helps me. Advance Thanks and If the information i've given is not quite complete please point out to me which info I forgot to add.
EDIT:
Additional info, the client pcs and the server pc is in one network.
I also granted every privelege to the serverPC settings of MySQL.(it's just for the test run)
Did you enable the MySQL user for localhost only access? You can check this in MySQL control center by browsing to your 'mysql' database, 'users' table, am ensure the host field of the user is set to % and not localhost, allowing them to connect on any NIC, not just the loopback (localhost) adapter.
We have an issue that I can't wrap my head around regarding possible solutions.
We have a site that runs off of a Dot Net Nuke CMS, with a custom asp.net CMS powering a reviews engine aspect of it too. This is hosted on a Windows server setup on SQL servers and has its own user registry.
We are looking at a script for an add on revenue offering, and the best of breed we have found happens to be Linux-based using MySQL servers. There are some other options, but none are nearly as robust as the Linux based one.
Our quandry is two-fold:
1) If we use this script, we will need to host a linux server with a different host service (ours only does windows servers). Both server sets will point to the same domain (www.mydomain.com) and have communication between the MySQL DB on the Linux machine and the SQL DB on the Windows machine.
Is this possible...and problematic? Or is this a fairly straightforward issue to solve?
2) The larger issue if the first is a hurdle that can be cleared is we would want to share our user registry between the two databases, so the user would not be logging into each DB when going between the two environments.
This issue is more complex than my understanding of authentication and databases so I'm hoping someone can help me out or at least start me in a good direction for research.
We could go with the other script routes, but they simply don't offer the functions or features of the more difficult to implement code.
OK, you can always run MySQL on the Windows box and install cgywin to run the script in a more unix type environment. Or run xampp on a different port: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
I'd like to create a VM in Virtual PC 2007 for use as a development environment/sandbox for an existing ASP.NET application in Visual Studio 2005/SQL Server 2005 (and VSS for source control).
I'm thinking that I need to create a 'base' copy of the environment (with the os, Visual Studio, and Sql Server), and then copy that to a 'work' version that I do actual development in. I would be sharing this VM with one or two other developers who would be working on different parts of the app.
Is this a good idea? What is the best way to get my app/databases in and out of the VM and the changes I make into VSS? Is it just a copy from the host location to the VM share and back again? How do I keep everything synchronized?
Thanks!
I would seriously suggest you the following things:
Use a "server" solution, rather than a desktop solution. That's far more reasonable if you want to share the VM environment with other developers.
Use VMware's products rather than Microsoft's.
From these two points it follows that you should use VMware ESX Server and related products. If you don't want to / can't invest money in it there's a free version of this product: http://www.vmware.com/go/getesxi/, but I never used it.
Whether you choose to use the enterprise version of ESX server or the free version, I suggest you put your IT organization's IT department on it.
It's not a bad idea, if you think there's a need for it.
I do something similar when I need to develop a Windows App because it's just nice to have a clean environment. That way I don't accidentally add a reference to something that's not necessarily included in the .NET Framework. It forces me to install any 3rd party components as I'm developing and documenting. This way, I can anticipate prerequisites, and ensure that I have them documented before I load software to a user's PC and wonder why it doesn't work.
Just make sure the PC it's hosted on can handle the additional load. My main Dev PC is a dual core processor with 4GB RAM. I devote 2GB to any virtual PC I plan on using as a development environment so that I don't hit too much of a performance snag.
As for keeping everything synchronized, you will want to use some sort of source control (as you should even in a normal environment). (I like SVN with Tortoise SVN as my client of choice, but there are plenty of alternatives.) Just treat the virtual PCS as if they were normal PCs. Make sure they can access the network, so you can all access your source code repository.
You can use the snapshot feature (or whatever it is called) - that chagnes to the "system" are saved to a delta file so that you can easily revert to an earlier state of the virtual pc. It has some performance penalty. This way you don't have to keep base and work copies.
I use Virtual PCs for all of my Windows development. The company I work for has legacy products in FoxPro and current products in .NET so I have 2 environments set up:
1 - Windows XP with Foxpro and VSS - I can access VSS directly from this image and the code never enters other machines in my network (I work remotely)
2 - Windows 7 with VS2008 and all the associated bits and pieces needed to develop our .NET software (including TFS). This is the machine I use every day - I have a meaty desktop PC so I I am able to give the VPC 4GB RAM and runs as fast as a 'normal' PC.
I have my VPCs running in VirtualBox and it is equally as good as the other offerings. A previous answer mentioned VMWare ESX which is an excellent product for large scale deployment but if you want a server solution then VMWare Server is free and is a nice virtualisation platform.
If you are looking at ways to experiment with changes and still want to use VPC then undo disks are excellent - you fire up the machine, hack away to your hearts content and when you shut down you can choose to save or discard the entire session.
For me Virtual PCs are an excellent way to quickly set-up / tear down development environments and I would struggle to return to using a single machine for all my work.
I was wondering if anyone had some good general information on windows terminal services and how it works.
I'm wondering:
If a DLL is loaded into memory is it available for all users or reloaded for each user. (or does it depend on something else)
A specification for an example server and how many concurrent users it supports with general use....
Any issues with them, I used one a while ago and we had sporadic freezes for a few seconds every so often. This could not be tracked down to a network issue someone suggested something to do with remote printers being attached to the system. It really annoyed users seemed to happen often when going to the start menu.
Is 2008 a big upgrade in terms of performance to 2003
Terminal Services is simply like a server with multiple "remote desktop".
DLL is not shared between sessions, just like ordinal process.
You need a special license if you want to use standard Windows server
I suggest removing all the printers when you want to use it (you can also disable them in client side), but that's not a big issue
2008 is far better for performance and security, but you'd also need more recent RDP clients.