Automatic Updates - Please help

david mindplay com

Dear anyone who can help, I am a programmer currently working for an educational software company. We have a windows product that uses a centralized database on a server that serves entire school systems with data over a WAN. Right now it is in the beta stage of development. We are having a delema and are hoping somone has the answer. The problem is: each of the workstations, and there can be thousands, need to be updated with patches every so often as they become availible. We can write an app. that runs when the workstation program starts, to check with the server to see if there is a patch availible and wheather or not the latest one has been applied or not. Then download it and install it. The only catch is, most times the workstation app. is started by students, and they are often times logged on to windows as a limited users. And when you are logged on to windows as a limited user, windows will not let you save files, except to certain, rather useless places for our purpose. Also, windows will not let you run programs that update or install things. Basically what we want is for the app. to start up and automatically update itself if there are updates availible. Thus making it much easier and less of a hassle to computer illiterate teachers, administrators and students. Who would otherwize have to apply a patch to each and every single workstation. That way the only person who has to worry about it is the top level sys-admin and all he/she has to do is post the latest avalible updates on the centralized server. Is there a way to achive this? Thanks for your help, If you require more info just ask.

Steven Campbell

Rewrite it as an ASP.NET application? No update problems there!! This is a large part of the reason that web applications are so popular. If you are needing to patch COM objects, i.e. written in VB6 or C++ using COM, then you have very limited options. There are some products out there that let an administrator PUSH updates to the client, such as Microsofts SMS application. If you have a .NET application, you have more options, because .NET apps support XCOPY deployment, i.e. you can just copy the program to a location that the user has rights to. There are also some prebuilt .NET components that help automate the process.

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Henry miller

Before you do anything, are you sure you need this at all? Just because version 5.1 is current doesn't mean versions 1.0-5.0 needs to stop functioning. If the user doesn't need new features and the bugs haven't hurt them (yet)there is no reason they have to update. Tell them they must upgrade to get support, but otherwise let them fall behind. In the case of schools it is normally best to update between terms so that students don't have to learn the next version while putting finishing touches on the night before it is due. (and a lot of students do this even if it is a bad idea) Just tell the teachers what the bugs are, and have them not assign something that would hit those bugs. You could write a program that runs (service? something else?) once a day, checks for updates, and if they exist loads them. I'd recomend checking out bit-torrent (or whatever it is called), or something like that, otherwise when updates do happen your servers will be swamped. (perhaps with something to prefer local subnets, since you can expect several machines to be on the same subnet in most cases) Make sure that you carefully test your application before each release. It would be a very bad thing for it to update itself, and then fail to work because of some obscure bug that only happens on strange systems... Perhaps you want to consider a back out program so if your update does break for someone you can walk the teachers through restoring the old one on the phone. (and check this ability twice as much) Oh, and make sure auto-updates are easially disabled for those with good admins who will do this themselves.