Centralised/shared COM DLL, possible?

Question

Hi,

We have a system that makes a use of 3rd party COM DLL written in vba

We have a centralised web application and 1-50 client machines that must reference that COM DLL in order to use our centralised web application.

The COM DLL is going to be updated rapidly in the future, which means that it has to be re-installed on every machine manually.

Is it possible to centralise this COM DLL somwhere on the network? Is there any other alternatives? Otherwise the maintenance overhead will be huge...

Thank you

Answer 1

Hi vikp, my suggestion is to wrap up your COM DLL inside a Windows Installer (MSI) package. You can then use the software deployment features built into Windows Server and AD Group Policy to install the MSI packages on client machines automatically.

You can use WiX to help you create MSI packages, and this Microsoft knowledge base article will give you a quick (but complete) rundown of how to initially deploy the package, and how to upgrade it later when you have new versions.

One of the nice things about this approach is that it ensures that new machines joining your network will get your COM component automatically, so it's one less step when setting up a new employee.

Answer 2

Package your web application by using WebStart technology. It has a built-in mechanism to check dependencies and download updated binaries. Even it is originally designed for java, it can be to any kind of artifacts, include DLLs. see http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/desktop/javawebstart/index.jsp