>I have a barcode scanning application that runs on 12 machines in our shop. Every time I restart our fileserver, I have to go around to those 12 machines and restart my application. Table maintainence etc... requiring exclusive use.
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>I would like to be able to send all of my users a message and then shutdown their application 5 minutes after receiving the message.
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>How should I approach this task?
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>Should I use a global timer to check for a message to display? (appapplication)


Steve, the most common approach is probably the global timer which checks for some condition such as a message file in a messages folder. If it exists your program displays the message and exits. The program should then also check for the file on start up and not load if the file still exists. This gives you control from the server when users can get back in again.