I’m about to start a new project.
The purpose of this project will be to install a small application on a remote PC that can do two (2) tasks:
- Read directory contents, and
- Rename and/or move files and folders
For those curious, this is so I can organize hundreds of media files on our HTPC. The family gets very upset whenever I start managing the files while they are trying to watch, the HTPC is very cumbersome place to manage, and doing it over the network from my desktop is very time consuming (example: move 1.57 GB movie file from \\HTPC\Ripped to \\HTPC\Movies involves copying the stream bytes from \\HTPC\Ripped to my PC where it is then copied over to \\HTPC\Movies).
So, I’m in Visual Studio 2010 looking at the Installed Templates under Visual C#. Typically, all I do is Windows Forms stuff with the occasional ASP.NET page here and there, so this could be a great chance for me to get my feet wet with some new technology.
Here are my list of installed templates under .NET Framework 4:
- Windows Forms Application
- WPF Application
- Console Application
- ASP.NET Web Application
- Class Library
- ASP.NET MVC 2 Web Application
- Silverlight Application
- Silverlight Class Library
- WCF Service Application
- ASP.NET Dynamic Data Entities Web Application
- Enable Windows Azure Tools (this might not be a template, but an installer)
- Excel 2010 Workbook (NO!)
- Outlook 2010 Add-in (NO!)
- Word 2010 Document (NO!)
- Activity Library
- WCF Workflow Service Application
- Crystal Reports application (NO!)
Some of these obviously are not the right type of projects, but I’ve really got no experience with Silverlight, WCF/WPF, or MVC.
I could easily create two (2) Windows Forms applications that communicate to one another by sending messages across TCP, but is there something more modern that would leave me thinking, “Boy, that was simple and it works great!“
If one of these is ideally suited for this Remote Desktop like tool, bonus points for pointing me towards good tutorials in getting what I want accomplished.
Note: To run Remote Desktop, the HTPC would need to be upgraded from Win7 Premium to Win7 Pro, and Windows Media Center closes whenever a Remote Desktop session begins.
You could create an ASP.NET page running in IIS on HTPC, which would have the functionalities needed (direcory browsing, file copying etc?). Then you could just use the web-page to manage your stuff without disturbing your family.
Then you must also give some additional rights to the IIS process to allow it to make modifications to the computer. Also you must have some firewall on the IIS computer to be sure it’s not accessible from the internet so that no one else can also use the web-page.