I've created a service for one of my apps. How do i create a system tray component in VB.net that can be used to monitor the progress of the service? Is there a way to have this installed via tcpip on multiple client machines such as those that are for our employees?
We do exactly that here, with the server running a really basic HTTP server on a configurable port on a separate thread that returns status in an XML format (nothing else, just that) -- the client just uses a web request to get the XML, before parsing it and displaying it appropriately.
This approach also allows for future extensibility (detailed status, sending service control commands, adding an association to an XSLT file elsewhere for use with a normal web browser, etc.)
You could use WCF for this. Using WCF your service would open up an EndPoint which would expose status information to callers. You could then build a tray icon application that can be deployed to the employees workstations. The tray icon application could periodically poll the WCF service the your Windows Service is hosting and get status information. I know #Johan mentioned Remoting already and this is a similar approach. I'd recommend WCF though as the programming API is more simple, IMHO, and WCF will give you more flexibility with regards to network transports, etc.
I guess your question is not about how to actually do the "traybar"-thing, but how to communicate with the service to get the information you want to show in the monitor/traybar-program?
It can be done in many ways, API is one way, use sendmessage/postmessage/getmessage is one way to make 2 running programs communicate with each other without having to store anything in files or databases first.
DDE is another way. If it needs to do the stuff via net then there is something called NetDDE, but I havent done anything with NetDDE I cant help anything there.
But about the API and DDE, feel free to ask more questions if you want some clarification.
I'll take the second question: Is there a way to remotely install software on client machines?
Yes. However it is very dependent on your environment. For example, if you have an Active Directory domain, you can use group policy to force installation of software on the client boxes.
If you don't like that or if you aren't on active directory, you can buy something like Altiris to push installs down.
Another option would be to use login scripts which would run a custom program to detect if your program is installed and take appropriate action. But then you are probably better off buying Altiris.
For the comunication part, i have used remoting before, and this works very well. With a little bit of configuration, you can even get it working to another machine.
Related
I have a Small ERP Financial Software developed in VB.Net and SQL Server consisting on modules
HRM, Accounts, General Ledger etc.
Now i want to run some module on web but Creating all application in asp.net or other web tools is too much time taking.
Is There any way to run this Desktop application on web espacially in Web Browsers. ?
Any Help.
If you don't want to re-write your application you could have a look at Go Global.
I can't vouch for it as I have personally never used it, but I know of people who have.
I have tested that for a proof of concept on the past and it runs great. Called .net zero deployment, you can look it up. The only concern is off you need database access, remember that you are paying through the port 80, so a need for a web service to access database call may be needed. Not sure of I have still the code trial, but I can look.
I have the following scenario:
We develop a silverlight 4 app for our customers, that will be used as an out-of-browser app. The app is working offline, i.e. app and database are on the users local machine. The app is using WCF-RIA-services to connect to the local database. The database will be an SQL Server Express, SQL Server CE or MySQL. We are using MVVMLight and MEF.
An external webserver is only used for updating the app from time to time or adding new modules to the app. To achieve this we do something similar as shown in Jeremy Likness blog (http://www.wintellect.com/CS/blogs/jlikness/archive/2010/05/25/silverlight-out-of-browser-dynamic-modules-in-offline-mode.aspx )
The reasons why we are doing such a scenario are complex. But to keep a long story short it is mainly for compatibility reasons for a later online version and we don't want to use WPF. So we need to get this working with Silverlight and WCF-RIA services.
Ok, that's the scenario and here's the question:
Do we need a local webserver in this scenario? The app is programmatically installed as out-of-browser, the database is local and connected via WCF-RIA.
If yes, which webserver would be sufficient? It should be installed and configured via an initial setup that is executed by the customer. The customer should not have to do anything with configuring the webserver.
Any other ideas or comments on this scenario? Any other possible solutions for this?
Thanks for your help
Dirk
silverlight wasn't meant to be used this way I think. So it would be like when you are developing app in visual studio and use Cassini to see result - everything runs locally - but you still need a web server. Maybe more info here - http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/06/WPF-vs-Silverlight
I´m not able to provide with a full answer to your problem, as we are currently facing the same problem. (WPF not being cross-platform, Very specific hardware on some clients)
But I may share some of our thoughts on our type of Thick-Silverlight-Client:
To keep deployment etc. simple we use a self-hosting process (installed as background process)
We may not use RIA as the background process has to run using Mono VM (but for MS-only solution see Can WCF RIA Services be self hosted? )
Architectural thoughts on standalone "Clients":
Depending on your requirements implementing a server for each client communicating with the "main"-server by messages (NServiceBus) may be overkill. But if you want to use a client database if offline and silverlight for ui you should consider using an event-driven-architecture.
There is a slideshow on combining "Event-Driven-Architecture" & "CQRS" with Silverlight. But i would not use it as a blueprint more like an inspiration.
http://www.slideshare.net/dennisdoomen/cqrs-and-event-sourcing-an-alternative-architecture-for-ddd
I am in the process of integrating our custom web app with QuickBooks Enterprise 9. My thought is that I could use QuickBooks as my "database" of sorts. When a person creates an invoice, the invoice is actually stored only in QuickBooks. When a person views a list of invoices, they are actually viewing a list of QuickBooks invoices. I want to make sure the data is stored in only one location.
I realize that I could use the QB Web Connector, but the problem with that is I wouldn't have control over when the requests to QB actually get processed (That job is up to the Web Connector).
So I have my web UI to act as the QuickBooks "face," but I don't have any good way to get to and from the QuickBooks file located on an internal server. What I was thinking was that I could create a WCF web service and install it on the QuickBooks server. The web service could then be my integration point. My custom web app could then consume the web service and, viola, I have access to my QuickBooks files.
My question is this: Can a WCF app connect and run QuickBooks? If not, could i create a Windows service to act as my point of integration? If so, can my custom web app "consume" a windows service?
I'll start by warning you that QuickBooks probably isn't your best choice for a reliable back-end database accessible from a remote website. In fact... it's probably a really, really bad choice.
You should have your own application database, and then if you need to also exchange data with QuickBooks, do that outside of the normal lifecycle of your app, as a separate sync process.
QuickBooks generally isn't reliable enough for always-online type of applications due to a number of reasons:
Flaky SDK connections
Updates and single-user mode will
lock you out of accessing QuickBooks
Difficulty in establishing SDK connections from non-GUI processes (Windows Services and IIS processes)
With that said...
Yes, you could create a WCF web service, host it on the QuickBooks machine, and make your WCF web service relay messages to/from QuickBooks.
Yes, you could also create a Windows Service that does the same sort of thing.
Do NOT implement it as a Windows service, and do NOT implement it within IIS - instead implement it as a GUI app that runs alongside QuickBooks.
If you try to implement things as a Windows service or within IIS, the QuickBooks SDK requires you have a GUI available (it users a GUI COM message pump for events dispatching or something like that...) to process requests, so you'll probably need to use something like QBXMLRP2e.exe to straddle the process boundary between QuickBooks and your non-GUI Windows service/IIS. My experience has been that it's a gigantic pain in the butt, and requires mucking with DCOM permissions as well.
I have an example and some documentation on my QuickBooks integration wiki.
The IDN Forums are a good place to ask questions.
My recommendation to you would be to either:
Use the Web Connector and QuickBooks
and give up hope of keeping all of your data in one place. Cache the data in a real database, and update it by querying QuickBooks periodically. I'm almost done building a solution to do exactly this right now, and it works fantastic.
OR
Use a different account system. NetSuite is pretty nice. I'm not sure what else is out there, but if I were you I'd look for something SQL-based or with a strong SOAP/REST API.
I'm part of a distributed development team. We all work through terminal services, accessing a remote server where our applications are located.
We're working on a project in which a client application consumes a WCF service, which exposes all the business logic functionality.
In our development process, a developer is often asked to develop an entire use case from user interface to database access, including the service and the business logic.
In such cases the developer must be able to debug the functions/methods on the server side that she/he has build for a given use case. The problem with that is that the service must be run and when another developer needs to debug his/her work, an exception is thrown (I think it is 'AddressAlreadyInUseException' not sure) and the 2nd developer is not able to perform any kind of debugging at the service. This happens even thought we (off course) have different windows usernames and hence we are working in different sessions.
It's still possible for the client app. to continue working with the 'original' service instance since we're catching the exception at the service, but debbugging is impossible. And if the first developer stops the wcf service then the app. fails.
I would like to know if you could have any recomendation for us. My be there's some sort of tool available (even if we must pay for it) that could somehow isolate each developers' workspace at the server... or may be we just need to change something in the way we work.
I would be very grateful for any kind of advice or clue.
Best regards,
Gonzalo
I would recomend that each developer had their own copy of the server services.
When we develop, each developer has a full environment on their machine. As things are completed, they are checked in to the version control system. When the other developers get the lastest version, new functionality is spread to the other developers.
If I understand your setup, all developers are working against the same server, in this case a programming error of one developer will stop all development.
Hey man, the debugger connects through IP communication. That means if a service or process binds a listener, no other service or process can bind this IP port a second time.
That is the reason for throwing the exception.
In Citrix you have the Virtual IP configuration.
You can also consider to place a VM on the server that serves only for one developer. This would also solve this problem
I have several different c# worker applications that run various continuous tasks: sending emails from queue, importing new orders from website database to orders database, making database backups and restores, running data processing for OLTP -> OLAP, and other related tasks. Before, I released these as windows services, but currently I release them as regular console applications. They are all based on a common task runner framework I created, and I am happy with that, however I am not sure what is the best way to deploy these types of applications. I like the console version because it is quick and easy, and it is possible to quickly see program activity and output. The downside is that the worker computer has several console screens running and it gets messy. On the other hand the service method seems to take to long to deploy and I have to go through event logs to see messages. What are some experiences/comments on this?
I like the console app approach. I typically have things set up so I can pass a switch like -unattended that suppresses the console screen.
Windows Service would be a good choice, it runs in the background no matter if you close current session, also you can configure it to start automatically after windows restart when performing a patches update on the server. You can log important messages to event viewer or database table.
For a thing like this, the standard way of doing it is with Windows services. You want the service to run on the network account so it won't require a logged in user.
I worked on something a few years ago that had similar issues. Logically I needed a service, but sometimes I needed to see what was going on and generally I wanted a history. So I developed a service which did the work, any time it wanted to log, it called to it's subscribers (implemented as an observer pattern).
The service registered it's own data logger (writing to a database) and at run time, the user could run a GUI which connected to the service using remoting to become a live listener!
I'm going to vote for Windows Services. It's going to get to be a real pain managing those console applications.
Windows Service deployment is easy: after the initial install, you just turn them off and do an XCOPY. No need to run any complicated installers. It's only semi-complicated the first time, and even then it's just
installutil MyApp.exe
Configre the services to run under a domain account for the best security and easiest interop with other machines.
Use a combination of event logs (with Error, Warning, and Information) for important notifications, and just dump verbose logging to a text file.
Why not get the best of all worlds and use something like:
http://topshelf-project.com/
It will allow you to run your program as command line or a windows service.
I'm not sure if this applies to your applications or not, but when I have some console applications that are not dependent on user input or they are the kind of applications that just do their job and quit, I run such programs on a virtual server, this way I don't see a screen popping up when I'm working, and virtual servers are easy to create and restart.
We regularly use windows services as the background processes. I don't like command-line apps as you need to be logged into the server for them to run. Services run in the background all the time (assuming they're auto-start). They're also trivial to install w/the sc.exe command-line tool that's in windows. I like it better than the bloat-ware that is installutil.exe. Of course installutil does more, but I don't need what it does. I just want to register my service.
We've also created a infrastructure where we have a generic service .exe that loads .DLLs based on an interface definition, so adding a new "service" is as simple as dropping in a new DLL and restarting the service host.
However, we started to move away from services. The problem we have with them is that they lock up the DLLs (for obvious reasons) so it's a pain to upgrade them. We need to stop, upgrade and then restart. Not hard, but additional steps. Instead we're moving to special "pages" in our asp.net apps that run the actual background jobs we need done. There's still a service, but all it does it invoke the asp.net pages so it doesn't lock up any of our DLLs. Then we can replace the DLLs in the asp.net bin directory and normal asp.net rules for app-domain restart kick in.