Auto FE Updater

For the first eight or nine years I accepted donations. For 2010 I tried voluntary licensing while I added many ease of use features such as the wizard and updating the settings via forms. Then for a month I've tried the Enterprise Edition as a premium value that organizations would be convinced to license to help fund the continued work on the utility. However voluntary licensing and Enterprise Edition licensing were a lot lower than my lowest expectations.

In addition the Auto FE Updater is now a fully featured easy to use utility with a wizard and screens to update the settings rather than using clumsy editing and debugging of INI files using Notepad. The ease of getting new users going with your application with the Create User Email so very convenient.

This utility has taken at least a fifteen hundred hours over the last ten years to develop and test. There are 18,192 lines of code in version 3.14. I have no idea how many hours I've spent in responding to emails, newsgroup and forum questions other than, as of fall of 2010, there are at least a thousand emails in my Auto FE Updater email folder.

The Access LDB/LACCDB only records the workstation name. The only way to determine the name of the user is to query the log database file for the last user of that workstation. This, of course, doesn't work for Terminal Server users. You need to implement the AutoFEUpdater_ExitApp code as found in the Auto FE Updater Sample Code Vx.xx.mdb in the distribution zip file.

That's an indicator there are unacknowledged errors or warnings in the log database. Some warnings don't generate alert emails as they are not important enough but they should still be logged. This is checked every 60 seconds by a SQL query to the AutoFEUpdater Log.mdb file and when StartMDB.exe or the List of Config Files form receives the focus.

If the users have read/write permissions to the folder where StartMDB.exe lives then you can put the AutoFEUpdater Log.mdb in that folder. Otherwise if you only have one application which uses the the Auto FE Updater then you can put the AutoFEUpdater Log.mdb file in that folder. However, if you have more than one application the AutoFEUpdater Log.mdb should reside in a folder to which all the possible users read/write/create/delete permissions.

The AutoFEUpdater Log.mdb is designed to be shared among multiple Auto FE Updater configuration files.

No, the FE.mde file is only for the developers or the IT administrators to use. There is no need for the users to get the FE.MDE. I will be putting in a method of having the FE MDE automatically downloaded to your Application Data folder but that's not quite ready yet.

Use the tips and code at Idle Detect/Inactivity Timeout to force users out after 30 minutes of inactivity.  At some point in the future I will be creating some code which can be placed in a hidden form which will check for the lockout status in the configuration files. This code will be added to the 'Auto FE Updater Sample Code V1.,xx.mdb' which you can import into your application.