Toolkit update launcher

[Viper]

This is a philosophy approach to solve a problem. I am developing several applets to help out our manufacturing and engineering staffs. A lot of it is just extracting data from csv files and doing some plotting while other applets automate some production testing with GPIB and Digital IO. I need to release installers for each of the applets as it is now and maintain them.

Inspiration: My son uses a game tool called swiftkit. It is a swiss army knife for a game called Runescape. When swiftkit launces it imediatly goes to a server to make sure it has the latest update and downloads any new releases. From there the user can use many different tools to help in developing game stategy. This way the player is ensured of using the latest up to date applets.

I would like to apply the same paradigm so that rather than maintaining (oh the paperwork) a fist full of programs I only have to manage one through the release process. Is this possible? Am I trying to reinvent the wheel? Can anyone point me in the right direction?

In thinking about this I would only have a updater to install on a new PC. Running the updater would install all the drivers I need (GPIB and DIO) and from there connect to a network to download any .exe files for each of the applets in the toolkit and any supporting data files. This way the updater seldom changes and only the files and launcher need to be maintained. The updater would look at a list of files that need to be downloaded and their target location. Upon completion it will call a launcher to run the applets.

Does this make sense?

Norm

[David_L]

Short answer is there is no all in one solution (that I know of) to do this already.  But I don't see why you couldn't build it into your VIs.  

So the first part you mentioned about updating files, VIs, EXEs, etc for your application seems like it wouldn't be too terrible.  You could easily check the version number of the application and check it against a webserver somewhere.  Then you can use the TCP VIs to transfer the files back and forth, just as long as you aren't trying to overwrite files that are in use.  

Second part would be the updating of drivers which I don't think would be nearly as easy.  Especially with the last few Windows Operating systems and all of the security protections they put in place about having applications access system files.  

If I were you, I would take a look at the LabVIEW Add-On Dev Center and post on their group discussion page with this question.  They work a lot with third parties creating add-ons and if something like this already existed, they'd probably know there.