Looking for downloader web solution - solution

I'm looking for a web solution that will provide a web page/application that will let a user download our installer exe (all required files are contained in the exe) such that they can pause the download and resume it at any time.
It's a 1.4 GB file, and currently our only distribution model (we are on a 0 budget).
Any advice? Our end-users are expected to be very computer illiterate. Expected to be able to visit a webpage and follow a few steps.

Do you also need a hosting solution? For that part I don't know, but you could check out Free Download Manager. It supports resuming downloads, and it's open source - GNU General Public License.

Related

How create an installer of chrome packaged app?

I need to demonstrate a test version of my app. I DON'T want to load it to the store yet. I want create an installer of my app, so the user can go to my site and install the application by clicking.
First of all, have you read the documentation including developer installation, enterprise installation, publishing on the Web Store only to test accounts, and recent announcements of changes? Assuming you have, then with the exceptions listed in those sources, all apps/extensions must be published in CWS. They don't have to be listed publicly, but they do have to be published there.
Your best bet is to use the test-account feature of CWS for your demonstration.
This is very easy, yo can create the installer vía chrome://extensions > Developer Mode > Package extension.
Then you got the .crx file, you can upload it anywhere and share it. To install it, user must open chrome//extensions and drop the file in the page.
The option to install from webpage by clicking was disabled in Chrome for security reasons.

Building customer based installation packages with install4j

I am developing an application which has customer specific configuration (2 text and 2 binary files). The use case supposes that customer downloads an installation package (I am going to use install4j) and install it on target platform (Mac or Windows). So all installation packages should be different for different customers.
I am considering 2 possible scenarios for implementation:
Generate new installation package per customer request on server side (cons: I need to have install4j for Linux, which is server platform)
Have a half-generated installation package and inject customer data somehow to the package by customer request (cons: I am not sure this is quite possible at all)
I never used install4j before and don't know how to implement 1 or 2. Their documentation is far from ideal. They doesn't have examples or consider cases like this, so any suggestion is very appreciated.
You cannot modify an installer after it has been built. The main reason is that it would break code signing. So you would need to generate a new installer for each configuration. If you deploy on Mac OS X and Windows, you need install4j Multi-Platform Edition which also works on Linux.
Alternatively, you could ask the user to provide credentials in the installer, then you could download the appropriate files on demand with "Download file" actions.

hidden (?) files

I'm writing an app that includes a folder/file explorer. That part is working. However, another app (Astro File Manager) has the ability to backup all of the installed apps to a backup location on the SD card. I cannot find or see the folder(s) where installed apps are stored. Supposedly it is in "/data/apps". My phone is NOT rooted and Astro works fine. Does anyone know what the trick is to seeing these folders/files? Is it possible to do this in B4A? Thanks!
Android doesn't allow you to access other programs files. Astro probably uses the backup API that allows you to backup other programs. However the backup API doesn't give you access to the files.

ClickOnce check for update without executing app

I work in a service organization where users of our internal tools are often disconnected. It is often the case that service engineers on service assignments are "stranded" with an outdated version of some internal tool.
These tools are deployed using ClickOnce publish VS2010 .NET4 . If the users run all their apps while still connected to corporate network, they would get a notification that a new version was available. As the number of various tools increase, the chance increases that some app is not updated.
Is it possible to automate this process, by a batch file or something?
So that the engineers just need to run one file when connected to corporate nw to get all the newest versions of their installed tools?
Added:
An easier way of saying it would be to have "something like Windows update" operating on corporate net, but for internal ClickOnce apps.
Very interesting question. I can't think of a quick way to do this, but it's definitely possible.
I would create another ClickOnce app whose job is to update the other ClickOnce apps. This app needs the url of each app's .application file. If all engineers are supposed to have all apps, that's easy. If not, maybe you could look through their start menu and find all the ClickOnce Application Reference files. Those files contain the url.
Next, just launch the url and pass a query string argument...
http://server/MyApp/MyApp.application?UpdateOnly=true
In the startup of your applications, you can check the query string argument and shut down the app if it's run with UpdateOnly=true.
One side note. If you set the minimum required version of each of your apps to the latest version, users won't get prompted with the new version dialog. Seems like you'd want to do that or the user would still have to pay attention and do a lot of clicking.

publishing your own Symbol site for WinDbg

This is an interesting challenge and I am not sure if anyone out there has undertaken it. I work for a software vendor, selling a large enteprise scale Microsoft.NET based software. Most of the production issues are triaged using DebugDiag or ADPlus dmp files. Our customers often ask us if we could publish our symbols public like Microsoft's http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols site. Any guidance here is much appreciated.
thanks
You need to set you Symbols Store using Symstore.exe. Then you can expose it over HTTP by configuring IIS. You can optionally use SymProxy to expose multiple stores as one HTTP symbols server. You can also use SymSrv to connect to different public symbols server, setup local cache and other advanced stuff.
And of course, you can even build your own symbols server DLL through the Symbols Server API.
There is an app for that: SymStore.exe. It is part of Windbg suite. You should also include the symbols drop step to your build process so it publishes symbols for every release.