Q100120: Installing and updating a custom JobServer module

Custom modules for JobServer.NET must be installed or updated directly on the machine running the JobServer service. This requires access by someone with administrative access to the machine. To install or update your custom module, locate the DLLs from your Visual Studio bin\Debug or bin\Release folder as appropriate for your project. If it contains any dependent DLLs or other resources required at runtime, copy all the files to a location that is accessible on the target JobServer machine.

On a typical machine, if the JobServer.NET application and service is installed in the default location, it should be in the folder C:\Program Files\XCENT\JobServer.NET. Within this folder is a Modules subfolder, which contains other subfolders with various modules installed in each. When the JobServer.NET service is running, it looks at this Modules subfolder and scans all its contents for changes. Thus, any valid module DLLs placed anywhere within the Modules subfolder should be found by the service.

Due to this behavior, the recommended practice if you are deploying your own custom modules, would be to create a subfolder within the Modules subfolder using your own organizations name. This naming convention should prevent any collisions with pathnames when future modules are made available. If your organization may be creating a few custom modules, you should consider extending this idea further and create unique subfolders within your organization folder. Repeat this for each unique module project that you might have. Thus, you should create subfolders in this path that might look something like the following:

C:\Program Files\XCENT\JobServer.NET\Modules\MyOrg\DataProcessing
C:\Program Files\XCENT\JobServer.NET\Modules\MyOrg\Reporting
C:\Program Files\XCENT\JobServer.NET\Modules\MyOrg\WebSales

Once you have a folder structure in the Modules subfolder that is appropriate for your needs, you simply copy all of the files generated from your build process, to the folder you created for it.

If you need to make changes or updates to your custom modules, you can do this at any time. Since the JobServer service will reload the module DLLs as needed, you do not have to stop the service to update your modules. Just copy your updated module files over the existing copies and the next time the module is used in a job, the updated DLLs will be reloaded using your newest version.