Efficient way to send alerts

[willste]

I am about to develop an application that will allow Messenger style alerts
to be displayed on users’ workstations. The nature of these alerts is for
“System X is currently down!†type messages.

What is the most efficient way of doing this? I want to reduce the overhead
on workstations, servers and networks as much as possible. If successful,
this application could be running on 25,000+ workstations globally, so it
must also be scaleable. Another requirement is to have little (or no)
dependencies on other systems (Exchange, OCS, etc).

I was thinking of writing a simple application that lives in the system
tray, which will poll an XML file on a DFS server (so presumably local) to
see if it has recently changed. If the file has changed, copy it locally, and
display the pending alerts.

Simple in its execution, but efficient?

Thanks

 

[willste]

Thanks for replying.

Are you referring to the FileSystemWatcher class? I haven’t had a chance to
write any code to test yet, but this looks perfect.

I didn’t want to include too much detail in my original question, as I
didn’t want to discourage people from replying by with a large post. But to
clarify “an XML file on a DFS server†being local, I was referring to the way
DFS would allow my application to connect to a single remote path, for
example, "\\mydomain.net\dfs\myapp", and always get referred to a DFS replica
local to my region.

Thanks again for your advice, this method will certainly be more efficient
that my original one.

 

[willste]

Thanks for replying.

Are you referring to the FileSystemWatcher class? I haven’t had a chance to
write any code to test yet, but this looks perfect.

I didn’t want to include too much detail in my original question, as I
didn’t want to discourage people from replying by with a large post. But to
clarify “an XML file on a DFS server†being local, I was referring to the way
DFS would allow my application to connect to a single remote path, for
example, "\\mydomain.net\dfs\myapp", and always get referred to a DFS replica
local to my region.

Thanks again for your advice, this method will certainly be more efficient
that my original one.