My company recently deployed our first Silverlight app, and, as expected, we've had a couple of small issues with getting it to run on some clients' machines. Mostly it was javascript that was disabled or using a non-supported browser, but I was wondering if there was a resource that lists the common issues that users run up against so that we can post in our FAQs section and hopefully decrease the volume of calls we recieve about it.
Thanks.
The user might not have Silverlight installed.
If the user doesn't have administrator permissions he or she cannot install it. -- FAIL!
The majority of users in corporate and government environments don't have administrator accounts.... to make sure they don't install stuff like silverlight. :-)
Related
A site I am responsible for is reporting that when our Windows Desktop application (WinForms, .Net v4.7.2) displays a login or authorisation form, our application now reports an error:
The program can't start because nex_sdk.dll is missing from your computer.
Once this report is cleared, our program continues without issue.
Our software does not reference anything called nex_sdk and it is not on my development workstation either, and Google has never heard of "nex_sdk.dll" so I'm somewhat helpless here.
Imprivata single sign-on is in play so I'm hoping it's related to that and I can have local IT repair/reinstall but I'd need an authoritative statement that that is the case.
Update: It is the Imprivata "Single sign-on" agent service/application.
I work in a public sector university
I use selenium with C# for automating routine tasks. I have admin rights so I just develop
various win forms apps to do that. But most of my colleagues cant use such apps as they do not
have admin rights. The apps are so useful and time saving that I want it to share with all colleagues
But admin rights is the issue, so please direct me to a solution that can work completely on client side.
Plz also note that I cant create setups and ask networking staff to install it on all PCs as there are
around 150 of them, and also the apps often are updated every couple of months.
PhantomJS worked without requiring admin rights, but it is already paused, as per their official page, so the only hack to my mind is, ask networking staff to install visual studio (with C# setup) on all PCs, this way I can just hand over the apps to all and they can open and run from VS, instead of direct exe, and it will eliminate requiring updating of apps as users will just need to get the latest app folder. A down side is un necessary window of VS and the memory but the benefits would outweigh this issue.
I am trying to deploy my WPF application to some users who are outside of our corporate network. Everything works great on our LAN but I can't get the updates working when I turn on security as the user is never prompted for their login details?
Does anyone know of a way to secure my ClickOnce files so that only my users can access it? I am not allowed to put this software up without it being secure.
Any help much appreciated.
There is no way to secure your files as the ClickOnce runtime will blindly return to it's deployment point and never keep hold of the users original credentials. I have heard of ways of getting round this using various techniques but its a fair bit of work.
This might be of use www.clickoncerevolution.com.
You could also always consider an MSI installer but you won't get the automatic updates.
Marty
Internally, you can restrict access to the files on the webserver. Externally, there's not much you can do easily.
We handle this by having our customers log in when they run the application, and we verify their credentials against backend services (running on Azure). So they can't run it unless they can log in.
If you don't want to do that, I'll share this article with you. It shows how to serve up your ClickOnce files from a SQL Server database by intercepting the requests to the webserver and responding. If you were smarter with web applications than I am (not a high bar, mind you), maybe you could figure out how to intercept and ask for authentication credentials at that point.
And here's an article from CodeProject where they show one solution for what you're trying to do.
I'm in the process of reengineering a desktop application to a Silverlight4-WCF client-server architecture. Apparently, some (not all) of our clients have very limited resources or dysfunctional relationships with their I/T support staff. Consequently, I've been asked to come up with a solution that would enable these clients to install the new SL app on a local desktop, possibly running IIS locally. Will probably wrap all this up in a installer to make deployment super easy.
While I don't endorse the idea of running IIS locally on each user's desktop, my thinking is that it will probably work. The biggest problem I envision is security -- the server code and configuration would be available locally. Still, I'm looking for input from the wider developer community because I'm uncomfortable by the proposal. What kind of hell and difficulties do you envision, or can this work with minimal fuss?
Using IIS locally may be more trouble than it's worth. Most configuration/maintenance tasks require the user to have Administrator access on the computer. Securing it is a bitch. Making sure its configuration doesn't drift and remains working as you release new versions is even more so. Moreover, it's not included in all Windows editions, e.g. Windows 7 Home edition. I recommend trying to roll with IIS Express as an embedded HTTP server instead.
As for code security - if you can't trust your clients' IT to look after deployment and security, or they can't/don't want to, you could host the server-side yourself and bill your customers for it, i.e. SaaS.
Just my 2 cents.
EDIT:
Oh, yeah. If you're concerned about trade secret theft, e.g. reverse engineering of your server code, just run it through an obfuscator, e.g. SmartAssembly. That'll give you an edge. As for IP theft, e.g. piracy, use could use some online license checking scheme - it won't compromise client privacy, and it'll deter copying.
In the office here we have a startup script that runs on the server which will update via copy/paste the software in house if there's a newer version on the server or not. This was simple, easy and fast to implement.
There is now a problem, many of our users are off-site and they use laptops/tables which don't connect to the domain to run the startup scripts - which means that these have to be manually deployed. This was fine for the one user that I've had for a good while. Now that I've got 10 - it's a no go. I've got to figure out a better solution.
Without developing something homegrown, are there any solutions out there that make auto-deploying/updating easier?
Note: This is a winforms app.
Is ClickOnce an option?
There's a lot to read at the link I am pointing you to, but it's really pretty simple. You would have to publish the app to a live web server, though. Something that can be accessed from off the domain. That could pose some security concerns. It's one avenue to explore, though.