通过Internet远程联系桌面应用程序的最佳方法

Question

I want to pass certain parameters to a desktop application remotely via the internet. I don't want my application to contact the server repeatedly, because many such applications can bring the server down easily. Is there a way to initiate the connection from the server? How can I identify the applications, as there will many of them running on many computers somewhere around the globe. I don't know where to start - I'm trying to do this in C# and ASP.NET/PHP on the server-side. Please give some advice.

Answer 1

Is there a way to initiate the connection from the server?

No. Not without having the client contact with the server first, informing it with the IP address, port to use etc... Which the server will need to keep for each client, hoping that they don't change (or get updated when they do change).

Long polling by the client is the right solution for what you are doing, even if you don't want to use it.

Answer 2

There are many different ways you could approach this, just thinking out of the box, both your app and the server could utilize a different mechanism for transferring the settings. I'm not recommending any of these methods, please don't shoot me down, they are all just ideas.

As an example, your server could connect out using FTP and output the updated settings to an FTP server on each PC. You could install something like Filezilla on each machine which runs your app. You'd obviously need to configure port forwarding on the router to allow the server FTP access.

You could use email. Setting up an email account where your server can login to send out the settings. Your app could possibly login to the same email account possibly even a single Gmail account to retrieve the settings.

Another idea would be to use a file sharing service like Dropbox, Google Drive or similar and where the settings could be shared. Obviously this would involve learning any API and I'm not sure if there are any restrictions on this approach.

The last idea and probably my preferred approach would be to host a web service and database on a remote server, both your server and the applications would connect to the same service to transfer the settings. This approach is obviously firewall/router friendly as all the clients connect out to the web service to collect the required data.

Hope this helps?