I’ve been presented with an architectural challenge and am looking for ideas.
Customer has an existing win32 native application that they are pretty resistant to changing in any but trivial ways. It is written in unmanaged c++ and uses at least one 3rd party dll so it is not a stand alone exe. What it is doesn’t matter much, think of it as a customer support communication tool. Ideally the customer wants to launch this from a web site rather than publish it as an installable program. Additionally the customer needs to pass a token to the executable when it executes so it can call home and ask for more instructions.
I will go ahead and concede that how the application would be launched should have been among the first design considerations, not the last — but it is what it is.
Security concerns over malware, spyware, trojans and the like make this a very unlikely distribution model. I have more experience in not doing this than finding a legitimate way to accomplish it.
Any ideas (positive or negative) are welcome.
Convince the client to let your company fix the original design flaw, most likely at your own expense. Apologize. A LOT.