Remotely stopping and starting applications

Question

I have a couple of .Net applications running in more counties on couple of PCs. Updating them is realy time consuming, because every instance is running on 5-6 computers with different settings and sometimes they are updated more time / day.

The plan was to create a little updating utility, which will stop the application, update necessary files and restart the application. I am having troubles with stopping/starting application on remote PC.

Of course there is a simple workaround, autoupdate function for all interfaces or watchdog applications to every PC, but I would like to go on the original way, if it is possible.

We do not need to complicate thing with rights, because a person who is running this application is always domain admin.

Thank you for your answers in advance!

Answer 1

If you write your applications as services then you can control them remotely using the sc commad line application, which will allow you to stop and start services remotely.

Also, once they're running as services you can easily write your own applications to control them using the ServiceController class in the .NET framework.

Answer 2

If they are GUI apps... then launching your app using something ClickOnce might be a way to go. I mention this for users where this maybe useful. Your apps sound more like services running continually.

Answer 3

Implement this the other way around. Have a central server where you host the new versions(installers) of your apps. Modify your apps so that they check that central server from time to time (could be a webservice call or whatever mechanism you can think of). If a new version is present the app should download it and update itself.