Web page to check PC for software prerequisites

Question

Our software's installer program checks the PC to ensure the prerequisites (.NET framework, service packs etc) are already installed. It largely does this by checking for registry entries on the PC.

I've been asked to look into producing a webpage that could do the same job, inspect the PC and report back what software version they have/are missing.

Windows update is the nearest analogy I can think of.

However I'm at a loss as how to implement it, I'm coming at this as a non-web developer, looking for a way of calling our existing prereqs checking code from a web page and sending the results back to the page.

Many thanks for any pointers!

Answer 1

create a separate function to check every prerequisite. You can check for the prerequisite in the same way as the software does, i.e by checking the registry. To do so, give your web script the path to the windows registry file. Read the file, line by line. And check for the entry of the particular software you trying to find. if it exists, it is installed , else not.

on the ui side, you might want to create a form getting some input from user and then on the hit of submit button, running all the functions.... and the result will be letting the user know,which services already exists and which are not.

You can write the code for above in php, ruby, python or any other such language...

Answer 2

Looking to reuse the existing code as Merlyn Morgan-Graham says, so I was thinking they'd have to allow a piece of software to be installed. They may not already have our software/code on their machine, the web page is for them to check their readiness with.

Its how I go about installing and running the software via the web page...