How can I notify the client computers using the pop-up balloons?? I really don’t know how to do it.
E.G. I will assigned a new task for the employees, when I click a button, the task will be saved to the DB. And a balloon with a title and the name of employee will pop-up in the clients computers.
Saving the task in DB is done. but the pop-up balloons?? How?? I searched it over the net but it seems I can find exact answer.
I already did an email notifications but I think email notification will not help me to speed up the notifications for the employees.
Thank you everyone who will helped me. This will finished my proposed system.
Once you save the data to the DB, you also need to broadcast the new assignment to all clients. You can achieve this by implementing a client/server architecture where upon program startup, all clients connect to a central server (it could be the DB Server itself, if you are allowed to do this) that broadcasts these messages. Once a client receives a message, you can use the NotifyIcon control in .NET. A full working example on how to use NotifyIcon can be read here.
You may think about redundancy as far as not having only one central server but rather implementing a ring topology in which messages are passed along the ring, for example.
You could also implement this using a Message Queue.
The balloon notification is the easiest part; it’s literally 3 or 4 lines of code. Broadcasting the messages (or polling for them) is more involved.
EDIT
Piggybacking a bit on Jeremy’s comment, you could also poll the DB itself for new messages. In your program you’d have to keep track of which messages (records) have been retrieved as to not to display repeated notifications. You could easily do this by keeping track of the last record id the program has retrieved. On program start up, you’ll need to get the current latest so that going forward you start showing notifications.