We are building an assistant UWP app for Windows 10 & Windows Mobile Devices. On Windows 10 we want to offer some sort of security enforcement to the user, e.g. making sure his antivirus is up to date and so on. This should be done through Powershell with Admin privileges.
Question: What would be the best approach here from architecture & user experience point of view?
Idea 1:
Architecture: UWP app communicates with a service (which is written as .NET Core web.api and offers simple REST Interface) and consumes this service through http client.
The service run's as local system. We want to host it in Kestrel webservice as this is supported when targeting .net 4.6. Prototype worked so far but everything runs in debug mode & not sure if there will be some issues with the isolation of UWP apps.
From my point of view, the UWP app is consuming the service through normal http requests which should not be isolated or intercepted in any way, right? There is no difference on consuming a local hosted webapi instead compared to a cloud api from UWP isolation perspective, right?
Idea 2:
User experience: User downloads the app from public store. App checks if it is running on Windows 10, if so, it checks if the helper windows service is already installed (through a API call on the webservice). If not, it offers the user the ability to download the service from a web page and install it (evaluated prompt).
What would be the best way to do it? Just giving a download link to the user? Or can I start a process from a UWP app that prompts to install an MSI? It should be as simple as possible.
Related
For .net Core webApi hosted on IIS, what is the simplest way to push event to the end-user app?
I do not need to notify user holding the device (ie "push notification"); I just want the app to catch the push so it knows to silently refresh the screen with current info. The brute force way to accomplish what I need would be to poll the webapi every 15 seconds or so, but I'm sure there's a better way.
Because of the breadth and evolution of the .net world, I've thoroughly confused as I search on how to push info event. I see discussion on Signal-R, push-notification api on google developers, firebase, etc etc.
I'd like to use the simplest way to send my simple poke from the server, telling the tablet to refresh itself, in reponse to, for instance, a record insert on the database.
This is a relatively simple app on Android tablets that for use inside the company, about 50 users at a time.
The webapi is written in c#, .net Core 3.1 hosted on IIS. The end-user Android tablet App, also hosted on IIS, is implemented as a progressive web app using React and run from Chrome. The tablets are used only for my app so I have control over how the tablets are set up. The web api program uses the MS-SQL database.
Thank you for any insight you may wish to share.
I would like to add/start/stop/remove an application (IoT Core) just like the web interface or the Power Shell commands: "IotStartup" but from within a C# application running on the IoT Core itself.
Is there a c# API for this or do I have to implement the Power Shell commands inside my application?
Using the Device Portal API could work for you.
Here are the docs.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/debug-test-perf/device-portal-api-core
Device Portal APIs are intended for remote management, and may not work from within a UWP against localhost due to loopback restrictions in Windows (to prevent an app from attacking the device it's running on).
That said, the Windows.Management.Deployment.PackageManager class provides installation and removal APIs for apps. To launch an app, you can use Windows.System.Launcher. Note that PackageManager is a restricted capability, so the app won't be able to go into the Store without special permissions from Microsoft. It will work in sideloaded scenarios though.
There is no way to close an app from another app with existing APIs. However, Launching the app using the above, then connecting with an AppServiceConnection to manage it, you can send a "Close" message over the AppServiceConnection that causes the app to close itself.
I have been struggling with this for over a month, but am slowly learning. Here is what I have:
C# Solution With 3 Projects
-Universal Windows Platform App (Cortana Voice Support)
::Above just shows a floating PNG image and is Cortana enabled
-Universal Windows Service (Cortana Background Service)
::Needed for the Cortana Support
-.Net 4.5 C# App with HTML DOM Automation
::Automates locating elements and clicking of a website
I can't re-code my .Net app's functionality in my Universal app because some of the libraries it uses won't install. (GhostDriver, PhantomJS, and a HotKey Library provided via NuGet. Installing on the Universal Platform fails on all 3 libraries).
What is needed:
-Master Universal Windows App or Service sends signal to .Net App
-.Net App receives signal and calls method/function providing my functionality.
I've never tried calling methods in other apps within the same solution and was wondering if there was a few-code workaround. What I need I think is a method of inter process communication or events, but can't find any examples of a UWP. Most are .Net communicating with other older non universal apps.
Thank you so much!
If I understand correctly, you were developing a app which will can automate the DOM operation through Cortana.
Do you need to submit this app to App Store?
If no, as Scott said, you can use WCF to communicate between UWP process and .NET 4.5 desktop app process.
If yes, as Andrew pointed out, you need an intermediate remote server hosting the service.
I have desktop application that can be installed on the users computer with "setup" msi file like any other application.
I'm developing web application and I need somehow to integrate the desktop application with the web application. Web application is developed using PHP (desktop application is developed using C#), and when clicking on one button on the web application, the desktop application needs to be launched.
Is there a way of doing this? I was thinking about a few scenarios:
-Maybe if possible to install the app directly on the server and to launch it from there?
-Maybe to be required the user to have the app installed on his computer and to call the app from there?
If possible I would prefer to not use the second approach because it's better if the third party to not be involved - it will be more user friendly if the application is launched directly. But any help will be appreciated because at this point I'm not sure if that is possible to be done at all.
You can install app at server an run it with exec() or "`" operator - but to control gui of app you need to use some like autoit ant etc.
If you ultimately decide to require your users to have the client application installed and expect majority of the users to be on Windows, you could register your application to handle specific scheme and parse its command line when started. More on this here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa767914(v=vs.85).aspx
You'd register a custom scheme and then intercept in in the application's command line arguments. The whole URL will be passed as an argument, e.g.:
myapp://parameter1,parameter2
The browser will mostly ask whether or not the user trusts the application to handle this scheme with an option to remember this setting.
If you don't have access to the source code of the client application, you can develop a middleware, some sort of a launcher that handles the URL and then runs the client application after maybe modifying some configuration files based on the URL or otherwise controlling the third-party application to do as you with.
As for solution #1, I don't think C# matters if your application can run on Mono, so you should be able to just run it from PHP. However, this probably won't work on web hosting and you will have to get a VPS for that.
There are very good (security) reasons why it is hard to launch client-side processes from web browsers.
Do you have access to the source code of the C# app? If so, you could consider modifying it to take advantage of Microsoft ClickOnce deployment.
Some references:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/t71a733d.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/t71a733d(v=vs.80).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6ae39a7c.aspx
http://www.codemag.com/Article/0902031
Here's an old article on deploying WinForms applications via ClickOnce with Visual Studio 2005: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms953320.aspx
It can possibly be done with IIS but it can be cumbersome setting it up to run as the current user, especially since it would probably also need to run elevated for an app that needs to attach to the current user's desktop.
Easiest is to install a Windows LAMP distro (like WAMP: http://www.wampserver.com/en/) and then run the httpd.exe directly from an elevated (Admin) command prompt; do not run apache as a service!
Once you do this performing and exec("command"); call in php will bring up a desktop app as if it was invoked from an admin command prompt. Obviously you need to set up the apache server to be accessible from outside the local system, etc.
I have a C# application that needs to always be running. I originally planned on making this a windows service but I now have a requirement to make the application host a web admin console.
I haven't played with IIS in quite a few years so my question is this:
What would you recommend I use?
I've thought about making a windows service and embedding a web server such as Cassini but so far I'm not very happy with the open source web servers I've looked at.
Can IIS handle this? Do people use it for this type of scenario, and if so how?
This sounds like a job for two separate projects.
One is the original Windows Service. Windows Services are well suited for what you're doing.
The second is the Web Project that will be used to administer the Windows Service. This is the part that runs in IIS.
It depends on what you mean by always running. An ASP.NET web application deployed in IIS could very well be unloaded by the web server if there aren't any requests for certain amount of time killing all background threads. So if you want an ever running background thread it would be better suited to use a Windows Service. As far as the web admin is concerned, well, here you don't have much choice: ASP.NET in IIS. In order to do something useful those two applications should be able to find a common language to talk. So you could use a database to store the results into which could be used by both applications.
IIS will run your app on first request, not on server boot. So you will still need to run a service to ensure your app is always running.
You can use IIS as a webserver for your web admin part, and link your ASP.net app with your service by means of a configuration database (easy) or webservices (a little more tricky).
Windows and Web services are two very different creatures. A web service will expose external methods that you can implement against an application, while a windows service is an entity within itself. If you're planning on using this service on a timed interval to perform an operation, a Windows service would be the right way to go. If you use a web service, you will need to invoke the method you wish to run from a secondary application.
If you need to queue commands against your windows service, you could always create a database that was accessible by both your website and your windows service. This way you could send commands and query data between the two. Placing a web service in to serve as an intermidary between the two may be overkill.