Category: Applications

This is useful when you upgrade an application and the path to the main application EXE has changed. The new path could just be a new EXE name or it could be in an entirely different folder. If you have it published via RemoteApp, you may have noticed the RemoteApp program location is greyed out.

 

You could just unpublish and republish the RemoteApp, but that could be a pain if you have a fair amount of options set for the app. Instead republishing, you can run the Set-RDRemoteApp PowerShell module to update the path.

In this example, I published the built-in Windows Calculator in my lab. Let’s say that Brenda in accounting found better a calculator and wants to run that instead. Once you have the path of the new EXE, run the Set-RDRemoteApp PoSH module. In my command below I specified the CollectionName, Alias, and FilePath (new) parameters. I did not need to specify any other parameters and it didn’t appear to override anything else. As always, be sure to test your command in a test environment or on a test application before applying to production.

Set-RDRemoteApp -CollectionName “Lab” -Alias “win32calc” -FilePath “C:\NewCalc\bestcalc.exe”

If everything updated properly, you should see the updated path in the properties of your RemoteApp.

Note: You may need to refresh the deployment in Server Manager, or just re-open it to see the updated path.

Oh QuickBooks…. you will never stop driving me crazy will you?

I lose a few brain cells every time I have to deal with a QuickBooks issue. Maybe I’ve been lucky and haven’t had to deal with QuickBooks online before or maybe people don’t like it enough to use it very often… Who knows?

Anyways, I’ve seen some posts about this error online, but the majority them deal with the full desktop version of QuickBooks. If you aren’t familiar with QB Online… Intuit now has “Better”, “Smarter” business tools for YOU. Yes you. Don’t use their Worse, Dumberer desktop based software… Get their all “cloud“ based software.

If you run a domain and lock down end-user access (like any sane Admin), then you probably know the pain points of running QuickBooks in your environment. At first glance it seems that QB online is not much different. They have a “webapp” you can install on your PC that appears to be built off Chromium. Run the installer and it conveniently dumps 550+ files (220+ MB) to the end-users local appdata… hooray for “cloud“ software!. If you’re using roaming profiles, hopefully you use a third-party solution that allows you to include local appdata locations (sorry Microsoft people).

The good news is that you do not have the be a local administrator to run the installer, hooray!
The bad news is that it requires Visual C++… which requires administrator access (not a big deal I suppose…)

I kinda rambled on there about QBO. As I mentioned earlier, if you lock down your environment, you may be familiar with the following Group Policy option:

Locking users out of the registry is a good idea, but apparently Intuit doesn’t think so… Because if you have this enabled you may see the following error:

You may be saying, but I already installed VC++! Me too! I installed it four times and rebooted three times… it didn’t help… trust me.

If you disable ‘Prevent access to registry editing Tools, then QBO magically opens up. So unless Intuit decides to stop using their barbaric method to check if Visual C++ is installed, you may need to disable this GPO option for those users.

I’ve heard that Intuit has an all browser based QuickBooks Online website, but I have to assume they released this webapp to provide additional functionality. Otherwise why would you have two ways to access the software?

Aaron Parker and Rory Monaghan scoured the internet for AppV 5.X and AppV 4.X recipes and compiled a great list on GitHub. Be sure to check them out.

View Rory’s article here.

An update to my Sequence Like a Boss presentation from BriForum 2015 Denver.

I attended Tim & Patrick’s session titled “5,4, 3, 2, 1, LIFTOFF! How Processes Become Virtualized” and learned that Acrobat DC is officially supported with App-V! In my session I mentioned that Adobe did not support Acrobat being sequenced in App-V. While that was true when I made my slides, it turns out they started supporting App-V 5 SP3 around a week ago. I do not believe they officially support older versions of Acrobat, but starting with DC is a big step.

Admin Guide/Recipe and more here: App-V Deployment: Acrobat DC

The Admin guide also mentions they have a separate MSI to enable “all” features of Acrobat.

To leverage all of Acrobat’s features, a supplementary App-V MSI must be installed on the user’s machine. The MSI should be available as a part of the downloaded .zip file. It contains Adobe Acrobat’s integration points for various applications such as:

• MS Office Integration – Context Menu and In-App Acrobat Ribbons.

• Mails Integration – MS Outlook and Lotus Notes will start showing Acrobat Features.

• Adobe PDF Printer – Allows the user to print any file to Adobe PDF.

• Web Capture – Allows the user to be able to convert a webpage to Adobe PDF inside the Browser.

• Registers necessary fonts on the client which will be used by the virtual application.

I haven’t had time to go through the guide, but this is great news in the App-V community. Big thanks to Tim for mentioning that in his presentation.

I have the honor to be presenting at BriForum again this year! On top of that I will be presenting in two sessions:

Sequence Like a Boss – Presented by myself and co-presentor Drew Walz

In a continuation of the popular Sequencing for Success series, learn how to Sequence like a Boss. Just because an application doesn’t work at first pass doesn’t mean it can’t be virtualized. In this session, you will discover how shims and symbolic links can improve application compatibility. Learn how to identify the files and folders that need them. Find out how to use the same tools to troubleshoot application errors once an application has been virtualized.

Can’t Fix Your Application Issue? Try to Break it Instead!  – Presented by Drew Walz and me as the co-presentor.

Sometimes knowing how to break a Windows application can be the best way to determine how to fix it. “Break-it” triage can help you quickly identify the general category of what’s causing the problem with an app, and suggest acceptable short term workarounds. Deep-dive application troubleshooting tools and practices are great, but they require time, effort, and focus to use. In a customer outage situation, you’ll typically need to find a fix more rapidly. We’ll cover quick application troubleshooting triage tactics and workflows that will help you zero in on the source of the problem.

Register for BriForum Denver and find other great sessions at http://briforum.com/US/

The BriForum 2014 videos are now publicly available! Catch the presentation that Rory and I did here: http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/videos/archive/2014/08/05/briforum-2014-boston-rory-monaghan-amp-ryan-will-sequencing-for-success.aspx

Also, I will be presenting at Briforum 2015 twice this year! Be sure to catch my session ‘Sequence like a boss’ and I’ll be co-presenting with Drew Walz in ‘Can’t fix your application issue?  Try to break it instead!’

I promised a while back to post some examples of creating and using shims. These are a little later than I wanted them to be, but here we are (finally). Since it took so long I added a bonus that I wasn’t able to include in my BriForum 2014 presentation, a video demonstration of the VIrtualRegistry shim.

My top 2 used shims:

• CorrectFilePaths – These are similar to symbolic links, but are defined per .EXE instead of system wide
• VirtualRegistry – Redirect registry calls. Can redirect HKLM to HKCU.

For a more detailed explanation on these, visit my previous post on shims.

Formatting your parameters:

CorrectFilePaths –

“original path”;”newpath”

Example:”C:\Programdata\Application X”;”Z:\ApplicationStore\Application X”

This will redirect the application call from the Programdata location to the Z drive. The Z could be a user mapped drive or any location you would prefer it go to. Keeping in mind that only the EXE(s) that you specify will only be redirected.

If you want to use environment variables such as %appdata%, I found that putting them at the begging of the parameter did not work. So I had to use “c:\users\%username%\appdata\roaming”.

Video Example:

VirtualRegisty –

ADDREDIRECT(key_to_redirect_from^key_to_redirect_to)

Example: ADDREDIRECT(HKLM\Software\Application\Database^HKCU\Software\Application\Database)

This will redirect the application whenever it calls the above HKLM key to the HKCU specified in the example.

Video example:

Download the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) here

As promised in my BriForum 2014 session, I will start a small series on Application fixes using shims and symbolic links. The first installment is on shims:

Shims can be really useful in just about any environment and I wish there were some better resources explaining how to use them. This is why I wrote this article explaining my two favorite shims.

As Microsoft releases new versions of their OS, folder structures and other key areas are bound to change. Or some applications may store personal user settings in a shared location or has a registry key that is best lived in HKCU instead of HKLM. This is where shimming or “Compatibility Fixes” come to the rescue.
A shim is installed at the system level and will essentially intercept an application call and change the default behavior of the application. The two main flavors of shims that I find extremely useful are CorrectFilePaths and VirtualRegistry. There are several hundred types of shims, but these two are the ones I find myself using a lot.

CorrectFilePaths
This shim is particularly useful when an application stores a file or folder in a directory that you want stored somewhere else. For example, say you install an application on an RDS server that stores a configuration file in ProgramData. This is not a good location if each user writes settings to it and get overwritten by other users. The CorrectFilePaths shim allows you to redirect the file call from the original path (e.g. C:\ProgramData\ABC Inc\UserConfig.ini) and replace it with a path that is user specific (e.g. %appdata%\ABC Inc\UserConfig.ini).

During shim creation you specify what process will be intercepted and redirected. This way when a user launches the process you specified and calls the file, it will be redirected to the new location. Now every user will have their own configuration file instead that doesn’t conflict with other users.

VirtualRegistry
Much like CorrectFilePaths, the VirtualRegistry shim allows you to redirect a registry call to a different location. An example where this would be useful is when an application stores a database server value in HKLM. This value may tell the application what server to establish a connection to. Now, say you have two groups of users – Group A & Group B. Group A connects to database server 1 and Group B connects to database server 2. Normally you would build a separate RDS server for each group to accommodate the multiple database values, but what if you wanted to have both user groups use the same server? How would you be able to accommodate that?

Create a new VirtualRegistry shim! You can redirect the HKLM values to HKCU and set those values with a logon script. This way Group A gets its registry key for database server 1 and Group B gets theirs for database server 2.

Shims sound great and they really are, but they can be a pain in the rear to get configured. I’ll post an article on both shims with examples in a few days.

If you want to get started Shimming, download the Application Compatibility toolkit from Microsoft here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?linkid=205020