>Oops, sorry Hilmar, this was really intended for others, not you, I forgot to say so.
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>>I still suspect that the fact of keeping an EXE on the server isn't a big deal for performance, but I am not sure.
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>PMFJI, but in this day & age of fast machines & networks, server vs local performance is not usually a big deal at all. Especially if your EXEs come in under around 10 MBs. Hardly even noticeable whether server or client is starting up. OTOH, I have a 20MB photo-app EXE thst takes very noticeably longer when run off a server...(it's slow enough locally already, but reeeaaaallly slow off a server).
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>The main issue for many of us is just EXE updatability, especially when rolling out new apps or serious updates. If you take Fred's advice (using a launcher EXE to check to see if new a EXE needs to be copied to a local machine and started up), you're in good shape if you need to copy a freshly built EXE to the server, you can do 50 EXE updates a day if you need to withouta problem. Each user will get the latest version copied to local on the next startup, just that simple. If it's a true emergency to deploy the update, then you can send emails instructing users to shutdown your EXE and restart it, to load the updated EXE. Even the really "unsavvy-user" clods can understand this method of update, just "Please shutdown and restart."
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>But with a server EXE running by even 1 user, how do you intend to copy a new EXE to the server quickly? You can't, is the answer, except when all users are off the system - perhaps in the middle of the night, and that's if you're lucky, and all users have shutdown the system as they're supposed to (ha-ha). Otherwise you'll have to manually terminate the server EXEs running, by using a tool like Server Manager - and possibly lose some data edits, or even corrupt the data by an abrupt disconnect like that. That's our main issue, anyway, and the primary reason for using the server-to-local launcher method.
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>Not a performance issue, but rather an update issue.

Updating the EXE on the server is also possible, if you give each version a different name: App_0001.exe, App_0002.exe, etc. In this case, a small loader program for the user can run the latest version of the executable right off the server.