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hi i'm looking for recommendations for an auto update piece for my application. I've seen a bunch that can update individual computers. I'm trying to avoid that. here's my situation:

i have a medical app that resides at doctor's offices. the entire office has to update at once or we have problems since it runs against a sql server db and all clients needs to be the same version. right now i manually push up the update (msi package) to each office's server. The app itself has built in checking to see if the new msi is on the server at the office and it'll run and update itself.

what i'm looking for is a windows service that runs on each office's server. it checks at a predetermined time (preferably at a random time between x and y that i define) my cloud server to see if there's an update. if so it downloads it and puts it where i need it on the server. That's really all i need. A plus would be to be able to only update office x,y and z but skip a, b this time for this update.

i can't have each app check for updates on my cloud server either as most offices have HORRIBLE internet. I've seen like 156k a sec offices... I can't pull down 100 meg x 20 computers at those offices all at once. i'd take hours.

I know i can roll my own in a couple days, but i'd rather pay for something and let the other company deal with keeping it running.

Thanks!

Jspano
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  • How many Servers are you talking about..? also do you have any Replication in place.. ? have you thought about some service that runs as well as perhaps some SSIS package ..? have you thought about implementing an XML based web service that can quickly determine ..? this question can lead to a lot of opinions as well – MethodMan Sep 08 '14 at 21:23
  • Side note: considered either rewriting your post to not look like search for tools/libraries OR ask somewhere else, possibly on http://serverfault.com as it seems like relatively common problem when managing company network. – Alexei Levenkov Sep 08 '14 at 21:25
  • right now it's about 15 servers. could grow to 100+ in the next year or 2. the problem is that each office is it's own entity. none of them can talk to each other, nor do we really want them to. I don't care if 10 offices update and 10 don't as long as any given office gets the update to all their computers. I could roll a web service and windows service to check for updates at each office, but i was hoping to avoid doing the work as i don't have time now. hoping there was something prebuilt that could handle this. – Jspano Sep 09 '14 at 20:32

1 Answers1

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I've used clickonce to do this in the past, and it worked great. This thread has a pretty good rundown of other options:

Auto-update library for .NET?

Happy coding!

Community
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Justin Beckwith
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  • Thanks Justin, i've looked at click once and auto update and both seem to only handle updating clients. I don't want to do that as it's a huge load on the cloud server and also prone to errors. any client that doesn't update can't run against the db as that can create data errors and the older clients dont' know about the sql structure changes etc – Jspano Sep 09 '14 at 20:30