Where would I start with firing an event over a network? In my case, when I change a database record, I want to inform any other user on the network running the same application that it has changed.
Edit:
It’s nothing clever, don’t get excited. I’m writing a document management system and when a document is changed in any way (deleted, checked out, up issued, etc), I want to ‘tell’ everyone something’s changed. I was going to use a FileSystemWatcher to watch a folder on the server, sign each instance up to it’s Deleted event and just create and delete a file in the watched directory, but that’s just dirty isn’t it? As you can tell, I’m not a professional programmer 🙂
What kind of notification timeframe are you after? I would personally have the client machines poll the server for updates – e.g. ‘My most recent update was on 17/02/2009 11:56:00 – what’s changed since then?’ – by implementing a webservice or simple socket-based server on the actual server.
Otherwise, if it is a distributed app, your ‘simplest’ bet would be a UDP broadcast – assuming they are on the same subnet and not separated by 20 degrees of routers.
Can you tell us a bit more about your situation?