I'm looking for suggestions on keeping a program that is running on a network updated. Installation consists of 15 users, each have the program on their local pc, but they all access same date from sql server.
I am looking for a clean method that would allow me to update one folder on the network and for each computer to get updated when they run the program and the programs sees a later ver on that folder on the network. (Obviously I can do this inside the program itself since it won't allow being overwritten while opened.)
You should have a look at
ClickOnce is a deployment technology
that enables self-updating
Windows-based applications that can be
installed and run with minimal user
interaction.
Using ClickOnce Deployment in
VB.NET
ClickOnce - A new VB.NET 2005 Deployment Tool
ClickOnce Deployment for Windows Forms Applications
ClickOnce Deployment in .NET Framework 2.0
Another option is to create a second program that will check the network for an updated version of your application. Let's call this program "updater.exe".
You can run updater.exe on system startup like Adobe Reader or Sun Java do.
Or, when your application is started it can load updater.exe. If updater.exe finds an update, it can close/unload your application, download the newer version, restart your application and close itself.
astander's answer above is correct, you can use ClickOnce for this. Another option is creating this application as a web application.
Web applications basically work the way you described, the application's files reside in a web server, all the users connect to it using a browser, and to update the application you only need to update the files in the server.
Related
Currently I am working on the development of CATIA by C++ and Automation Interface. Everything is based on local environment of every client machine. After updating our program, clients have to deploy it manually after receiving the updated one.
We are considering if there is a way we could put our program on the server, and we assign the authorizations to the specific clients to access it. They still need install CATIA in their local machine, but our customization programs are on the website.
Our program is based on COM component, so this is a priority.
Any feasible idea?
Thanks in advance.
I'm developing programs for Catia too (VB .NET) and there might be a solution to use webbrowser to manage the programs but I'm unable to help with that :)
Instead what I use is selfdeveloped feature which updates the tools exe files on client from network storage or FTP.
Think of it as algorithm which searches certain folders or storage and decides if the program should update itself and lets the user know. Then you run the updater which is not part of the tool (separate program) and he make the changes on the main exe (copy files, config, remove add etc.)
This way you don't have to take care of the deployment and the user only clicks the update. That's it :)
I have a Asp.Net Core MVC application running on Windows Server 2008 R2 with IIS. But every time I update this application, I need to manually stop the applicationPool in IIS, and restart the applicationPool after I finish updating the app. Otherwise it will tel me "the xxx.dll is in use by other progress".
Is there any way to make this process easier?
A workaround For Windows with no down time and I am regularly using is:
Rename running .NET core application dll to filename.dll.backup
Upload the new .dll (web application is available and serving the requests while file is being uploaded)
Once upload is complete recycle the Application Pool. Either Requires RDP Access to server or function to recycle application pool in your hosting control panel.
IIS overlaps the app pool when recycling so there usually isn’t any downtime during a recycle. So requests still come in without every knowing the app pool has been recycled and the requests are served seamlessly with no downtime.
I am still searching for more better method than this..!! :)
January 2022 - for Linux
For Linux, we use Openresty nginx with Lua script to hold (sleep) incoming requests for few seconds until the service running .NET Core or .NET 5 or .Net 6 application restarts and then we release the threads we had hold.
Refer: https://github.com/basecamp/intermission
Finally I found my anwser:
I just need add a file named app_offline.htm to the IIS web root(not your project wwwroot folder), and remove it after you replace all of your file.
due to this issue you may need try both App_Offline.htm or app_offline.htm .
and this will allow you to use FTP client to update
Opening the web.config file in an editor and saving it will cause the web application to reload, even if you don't change anything. All DLLs should be replaceable, until a user hits the site, causing the web application to start again. I sometimes use that as a workaround.
A more full fledged solution would be to use Web Deploy, either through Visual Studio or by command line. This can take a litte while to set up, but offers more automation.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/publishing/iis#deploy-the-application-1
There is no way to hotswap in place DLL's.
Your best bet is to deploy to a new folder each time (For example a versioned folder), and change the website directory in IIS once you have fully copied your website onto the server.
If you look at the Linux ecosystem (especially the Ubuntu and Alestic EC2 images) there is a common technique where the VMs are pre-configured to look at the EC2 user-data and use it as a boot script. The nice thing about this approach is that you can write a boot script that further provisions your machine, allowing you to avoid making a new image every time your software that runs on the machine changes.
I want to do the same thing for Windows, but given that I'm an Mac and Linux guy, I'm a bit lost on where to start. My requirements are:
This must run on Windows Server 2008
A bootstrap script needs to start when the machine boots up, read the user-data file by pulling down the contents http://169.254.169.254/1.0/user-data
The bootstap script then needs to run the contents of that file as if it were a script
The script embedded in the user-data needs to run in such a way that it has access to the desktop environment (ie: it can launch a browser, etc).
I'm not quite sure how services work in Windows or if I need to enable auto-login, so any advice here would be appreciated. The ultimate goal is to run a Java program that launches some custom software that in turn launches a web browser (IE, Firefox, etc) and is capable of taking screenshots.
The screenshot part is interesting, because in the past when I've tried this the only way I could get something other than a black screen was to have UltraVNC or RealVNC boot up as a service, though I don't know why that helped.
I'm looking for answers to three specific questions, as well as any general advice:
Should I be focussing on a Windows service or auto-login + bat file in the "Startup" folder?
If I use a Windows service, is there anything special that I need to do to make sure desktop access and/or screenshots are available?
Do you recommend any tools for common Linux commands, like curl or wget? Last time I used Windows I used Cygwin a lot, but is there something more appropriate to use here?
I have not tried auto-login on Windows instances in EC2, but here's the support document on how to enable it.
We boot-strap our Windows instances using a custom AMI with a custom Windows 'install' service already installed. The boot-strap installer reads a URL from user-data at startup. The URL points to a ZIP file stored in S3. The installer then downloads, un-zips, and executes the actual application installer -- in our case a simple CMD fie.
This setups allows us to have one base AMI and then be able to easily overlay 15+ different application configurations (without having to rebuild the AMI). If you only have one application configuration this may be overkill for your situation.
The only trouble we ran into was having our installer service start to early -- changing the service startup mode to "Automatic Delayed" fixed that issue.
We wrote our boot-strap installer in Java, launched via YAJSW, because we're comfortable with it. If you just want a few simple Unix tools, most are available pre-compiled for Windows, for example wget.
For something completely different, you could try PsExec to configure the instance after it has booted.
You can try using RightScale's free developer account to create plain Powershell scripts and associate them with your Windows instances to run at boot time. The RightScale dashboard solves exactly the problems you are trying to solve above.
DISCLAIMER: I work for RightScale.
As for screen capture CutyCapt is a simple tool you can point at a URL and generate an image from.
Unxutils is a great solution for those looking for unix tools on Windows. It's got the wget.exe that you're looking for, however, using Powershell to download stuff is not so bad either:
$wc = new-object system.net.webclient
$wc.DownloadFile("http://stackoverflow.com","test.html")
If you can write a batch file to do your setup, then you can run it at startup of the vm by doing this:
1. Run REGEDT32.EXE.
2. Modify the following value within HKEY_CURRENT_USER:
Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ParseAutoexec
1 = autoexec.bat is parsed
0 = autoexec.bat is not parsed
As an answer to #3, I would say that you can do just about anything in a batch file that you need which includes downloading from a ftp server (but not from a http server). I am really interested in this stuff and so if you have questions, try asking me.
If you use Elastic Beanstalks you can use this:
Customizing the Software on EC2 Instances Running Windows
It uses YAML formatting standards, e.g.
packages:
msi:
mysql: http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/Connector-Net/mysql-connector-net-6.6.5.msi/from/http://cdn.mysql.com/
or
sources:
"c:/myproject/myapp": http://s3.amazonaws.com/mybucket/myobject.zip
I know this is a little bit late to help out with the original post but for anyone who is still reading this one solution is to use the http://cloudinitnet.codeplex.com/ project. The service is easily installed using a powershell script and will create a local administrator account to use while running.
The goal for this project was to replace the Cloud-Init project used in Amazon Linux and Ubuntu.
How should I script my application(a C# console application), to run at the virtual machine start-up?
Should I use shell scripts or something else?
What should the structure of the script file be like?
Thanks, Catalin
Just copy you exe file in the Startup folder (Start->All Programs->Startup, right click->open)
You might try using SrvStart. SrvStart allows you to run any application as a Windows Service. While the vast majority of applications are not suited for this type of deployment (i.e. Notepad, Microsoft Word, etc.), there are lots of utilities which can run seamlessly as a background service. By interfacing with the Windows Service Manager, SrvStart “interprets” the Operating System commands, such as start (open) and stop (close), and sends them to the target application which doesn’t know the difference.
Here is an article that might be a useful starting place:
http://www.howtogeek.com/50786/using-srvstart-to-run-any-application-as-a-windows-service/
I've attempted just about everything to get our ClickOnce VB.NET app to run under Terminal Services as a RemoteApp. I have a batch file that runs the .application file for the app.
This works fine via RDP desktop session on the terminal server. As a TS RemoteApp, however, well... not so much.
I get a quick flash of command prompt (the batch file) on the client system and then... nothing...
Same goes for having it point to the .application file directly (without using a batch file) or even copying the publication locally and having it point to that.
I found a technet.microsoft.com discussion about a similar issue, but there's no resolution to it listed.
For anyone who has run into this before and got it working, what did you have to do?
We currently use RemoteApp's for everything else on that server, so I'm hoping to stick with that if possible.
The current workaround is to build and run an MSI-based installer for the app on our terminal server whenever we publish via OneClick out to the network, but this can be quite a pain at times and is easy to forget to do.
Since the app works fine via Terminal Services when run in full desktop mode but not during RemoteApp, I don't think it's anything specific to Terminal Server permissions so much as ClickOnce requiring something that isn't available when running as a RemoteApp.
The Key to getting it to work is to use Windows Explorer "C:\windows\explorer.exe". This process is the base process when you login to a full session.
If you setup the RemoteApp to use Windows Explorer and the command line argument of the path to the .application file for the ClickOnce application then it will work when launched as a remote application. Windows Explorer will flash for a second when it starts, but it will disappear then the ClickOnce application will launch.
Why does it have to be a ClickOnce application? I would consider just deploying the exe file and assemblies.
I know it only half a solution, but if the application does not change much, it might be a good solution.
I believe your problem is related to the fact that ClickOnce needs to store it's data in a special user folder called the ClickOnce application cache. Apparently because of how Terminal Services sets up user folders ClickOnce can't access this in TerminalServices mode.
See this link for more information.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/267k390a(VS.80).aspx
There may not be a way to do it :(
Can you launch the .exe directly? It's buried under your profile in \AppData\Local\Apps\2.0[obfuscated folders], but you should be able to find it.
That will skip the built-in update process, but if it can be launched that way you could then write code to do a manual update after the application starts.
Faced the same problem this morning and got it resolved by copying the clickonce app's directory from the user settings folder to somewhere like c:\MyApp\ - I know its nasty and not very ideal.. but good enough for me!
We recently ran across this issue and decided to post a bug report on this issue to the Visual Studio development team. Feel free to comment on the bug report. It has to be a bug in ClickOnce caused by some changes in Server 2008.
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/653362/net-clickonce-deployment-not-working-as-remoteapp-or-citrix-xenapp-on-server-2008-server-2008-r2
We also have a discussion on the MSDN forums covering this issue:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winformssetup/thread/7f41667d-287a-4157-be71-d408751358d9/#92a7e5d9-22b6-44ba-9346-ef87a3b85edc
Try using RegMon and FileMon when starting the app - You may be able to track it down to a file and/or registry permission issue.
Also maybe check the event logs to see if anything's getting logged when the process fails.