Question

Let’s say I have a windows service called ‘MyService’ and an executable called ‘MyEXE’ located on several computers on my network.

Is it possible (from within ‘MyService’) to start several instances of ‘MyEXE’ on a different/same computer, have it do some task and return a true/false result to a callback method in ‘MyService’?

Something like this

class MyService : ServiceBase {     delegate void UpdateCallBack(int id, bool updated)     void CheckForUpdates()     {         bool updatesExist = someService.GetCurrentVersion() != currentVersion;         if(updatesExist)         {             UpdatePC('C:\Program Files\MyApp.exe', 1, UpdateComplete);             UpdatePC('\\somepc\Program Files\MyApp.exe', 1, UpdateComplete);             UpdatePC('\\mypc\Program Files\MyApp.exe', 1, UpdateComplete);         }     }      void UpdatePC(string filePath, int id, UpdateCallBack callback)     {        //This is where I am kind of lost         SomeEXERunner runner = new SomeEXERunner();        runner.Run(filePath,'-u',id,callback);     }      void UpdateComplete(int id, bool updated)     {        //do something        if(!updated)           EmailService.NotifyAdmin('PC Not updated', id);     } } 

Maybe I’m getting the whole architecture wrong!

Answer 1

You could use PSexec as Ian stated, but I think WMI is a better way try this for an example http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/EverythingInWmi02.aspx