Is there a way to authenticate a customer without prompting? Ideally I'd like to be able to pass a value from my application via the Agent to the server-side, and then pass that value to an ASP page. The value passed is a maintenance key that my client-side application has access to. The ASP page does a lookup for the maintenance key and returns OK or FAILED to the update service.
I've seen many requests for this on the forum, but I haven't actually seen a way to do it. Any samples?
The agent by itself can only call a web page and send basic HTTP auth. You could get the same functionality, but you'd end up writing some code to do so.
The basic flow (high-level) would be to create a client-side plugin/callout. You can use the MSXML object to post whatever values to your web page and decide whether to continue. If you validate, then your callout would return true and the Update Service agent would continue.
You can check out the documentation for client-side plugins here.
I've got the same question - in our case we want to use a common serial number for 20+ installations on the customers PC. As far as I can see, they will have to enter this serial number for each product.
What we'd like to be able to do (without much effort) is tell the UpdateService what their serial number is so that it can be passed on in the "normal" fashion (ie as if they typed it in).
In the next release of Update Service, the agent will feature APIs which will allow you to the authenticate the user (with or without GUI) to receive an update. Stay tuned...
Yes, the release was earlier this month and should contain the items you inquired about. You can grab the SDK, etc. via links within the publisher site as always.
