This article is part of our "Tiger Bridge - Under the hood" series, where we uncover technical details about our product, dive deep into the solutions it offers, and explain which decisions we had to make while designing it.
Dilemma
Our dilemma about the installation and removal process concerns the need to restart the system.
Background
Traditionally, Microsoft systems have proven quite difficult for making system changes while the system is running. Windows is notorious for its restart requirements. As a result, while designing their solutions, most developers choose the easier path of making users reboot each time.
However, there are tools which can be used to develop a solution that does not require restart as part of the installation or removal process. This includes even the more complex systems which work with different services and drivers.
The critical components typically requiring system reboot are the drivers and the shell extension.
Pros/Cons Analysis
The pros/cons analysis here was clear – whether to put more effort into building a complex, non-disruptive system, or take the shorter path of having an easy setup which necessitates restart.
Decision
We decided to create a solution which does not require a Windows restart.
Arguments
With this decision, we had to focus on making Tiger Bridge non-disruptive:
- Being a hybrid solution, it connects to an already existing resource (drive or folder) instead of creating a new one. The latter would be considered disruptive. We prefer using the available infrastructure, drives and folders which the applications are used to browsing and storing on. As a result of, Tiger Bridge gets installed while the other applications continue to work using the same infrastructure.
- We do not want to make users restart their system or anything else, unless it is unavoidable. At present, Tiger Bridge only asks for an optional restart of the Windows Explorer, and it does that only if a user opted for the shell extension (also optional).
Conclusion
Thanks to our product decisions, our users can install and remove our solution without negatively impacting their workflows. For clients who support uninterruptible environments like video surveillance, this is highly appreciated.