How to launch an EXE from Web page asp net

Question

This is an internal web application where we would like the Web pages to contain links to several utilities that are Win32 EXE  The EXEs are trusted and produced by us   don t care if it asks if its ok to Run or Save   I tried direct link  e g  C  notepad exe  which works locally only   This will be a share on the network   Tried File     and did not work  IE7 is the browser needed

User · Answer

Did you try a UNC share        server share foo exe

User · Answer

You can see how iTunes does it by using Fiddler to follow the action when using the link  http   phobos apple com WebObjects MZStore woa wa viewPodcast id 80028216   It downloads a js file On windows  the js file determines if iTunes was installed on the computer or not  looks for an activeX browser component if IE  or a browser plugin if FF If iTunes is installed then the browser is redirected to an URL with a special transport  itms       The browser invokes the handler  provided by the iTunes exe   This includes starting up the exe if it is not already running  iTunes exe uses the rest of the special url to show a specific page to the user    Note that the exe  when installed  installed URL protocol handlers for  itms  transport with the browsers   Not a simple engineering project to duplicate  but definitely do-able  If you go ahead with this  please consider making the relevant software open source

User · Answer

Are you saying that you are having trouble inserting into a web page a link to a file that happens to have a  exe extension    If that is the case  then take one step back   Imagine the file has a  htm extension  or a  css extension   How can you make that downloadable   If it is a static link  then the answer is clear  the file needs to be in the docroot for the ASP NET app  IIS   ASP NET serves up many kinds of content   htm files   css files   js files  image files  implicitly   All these files are somewhere under the docroot  which by default is c  inetpub wwwroot  but for your webapp is surely something different   The fact that the file you want to expose has an  exe extension does not change the basic laws of IIS physics   The exe has to live under the docroot    The network share thing might work for some browsers   The alternative of course is to dynamically write the content of the file directly to the Response OutputStream   This way you don t need the  exe to be in your docroot  but it is not a direct download link   In this scenario  the file might be downloaded by a button click    Something like this       Response Clear         string FullPathFilename        server  share  CorpApp1 exe       string archiveName  System IO Path GetFileName FullPathFilename       Response ContentType    application octet-stream       Response AddHeader  content-disposition    filename     archiveName       Response TransmitFile FullPathFilename       Response End

User · Answer

In windows  specified protocol for application can be registered in Registry  In this msdn doc shows Registering an Application to a URI Scheme   For example  an executable files  alert exe  is to be started  The following item can be registered   HKEY CLASSES ROOT    alert        Default     URL Alert Protocol        URL Protocol            DefaultIcon           Default     alert exe 1        shell          open             command                 Default     C  Program Files Alert alert exe    Then you can write a html to test   lt head gt       lt title gt alter lt  title gt   lt  head gt    lt body gt       lt a href  alert    gt alert lt  a gt   lt body gt

User · Answer

This assumes the exe is somewhere you know on the user s computer    lt a href  javascript LaunchApp    gt Launch the executable lt  a gt    lt script gt  function LaunchApp     if   document all      alert   Available only with Internet Explorer       return    var ws   new ActiveXObject  WScript Shell    ws Exec  C   Windows  notepad exe       lt  script gt    Documentation  ActiveXObject  Exec Method  Windows Script Host

User · Answer

How about something like    lt a href    DangerServer Downloads MyVirusArchive exe     type  application octet-stream  gt Don t download this file  lt  a gt

User · Answer

if the applications are C   you can use ClickOnce deployment  which is a good option if you can t guarentee the user will have the app  however you ll have to re-build the apps with deployment options and grab some boilerplate code from each project    You can also use Javascript    Or you can register an application to handle a new web protocol you can define  This could also be an  app selection  protocol  so each time an app is clicked it would link to a page on your new protocol  all handling of this protocol is then passed to your  selection app  which uses arguments to find and launch an app on the clients PC   HTH

User · Answer

As part of the solution that Larry K suggested  registering your own protocol might be a possible solution  The web page could contain a simple link to download and install the application - which would then register its own protocol in the Windows registry   The web page would then contain links with parameters that would result in the registerd program being opened and any parameters specified in the link being passed to it  There s a good description of how to do this on MSDN

[asp.net] How to launch an EXE from Web page (asp.net)

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