My rant about Citrix and VMWare bullshitting the industry.

Recently, we sent out a survey to 7,000 students who completed an advanced XenApp training course or certification to understand what they would like to see and learn in an advanced XenApp 6 course. Thank you to everyone who recently completed this important survey! With your help, we are now able to better shape future curriculum to support this product. We will keep you posted on details of any future course(s) resulting from this feedback as they are available.

Didn't have a chance to participate? We are always looking for your opinion on a variety of topics! Please be on the lookout for more opportunities to tell us what you think via surveys, focus groups, workshops, and betas. These are all easy ways for you to contribute to the development of future Citrix training courses, exams, and certifications!

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At Citrix TechEdge Berlin 2010, you'll get a chance to meet some of Citrix Support's top engineers. One of these is Karen Sciberras. Karen is a Escalation Engineer based in our Dublin office in Ireland. Check out the video interview below.

You can also view some of the previous interviews with Nicolas Ogor, Lalit Kaushal, George Dunlap and Tomasz Czajka.

Learn more about TechEdge Berlin 2010, www.citrix.com/techedge, and stay tuned for more weekly close-up interviews with the TechEdge presenters.

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Let Karen know any thoughts, questions or feedback you might have for her session.

David
Citrix Support on:
Twitter - @citrixsupport & @citrixreadiness
Facebook
LinkedIn

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Sometimes the Delivery Services Console takes a long time to launch. This is due to a .NET delay in the authenticode signature component as described in Microsoft Article Q936707. The following config file can be added to speed up the lauch of the Delivery Services Console. mmc.exe.config Ensure the contents of the file contain the [...]

At Citrix TechEdge Berlin 2010, you'll get a chance to meet some of Citrix Support's top engineers. One of these is Nicolas Ogor. Nicolas is a Escalation Engineer based in our Dublin office in Ireland. Check out the video interview below.

You can also view some of the previous interviews with Lalit Kaushal, George Dunlap and Tomasz Czajka.

Learn more about TechEdge Berlin 2010, www.citrix.com/techedge, and stay tuned for more weekly close-up interviews with the TechEdge presenters.

Leave a comment

Let Nicolas know any thoughts, questions or feedback you might have for his session.

David
Citrix Support on:
Twitter - @citrixsupport & @citrixreadiness
Facebook
LinkedIn

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Today’s FAQ has been written by Justin Zarb, all around good guy and a Premier Field Engineer with Microsoft in the UK. You can read more App-V articles written by Justin at his blog: http://appvguy.com/

This terminology is a little confusing. The "Active" was added in 4.x and referred to the fact that we could add and begin serving an updated version while the current version was still actively in use. The RTSP, HTTP, FILE (SMB) protocols all allow this functionality.

However with RTSP, an App-V Management Server or Streaming Server sits between the client and the content (the SFT file containing the application). Clients never need to be told that there is an update because the server is checking every launch and streams the updated SFT. The client requests a Package GUID not a specific file.

An RTSP streaming client will get an update the next time they launch the app – no refresh is required. There is an exception here – all instances of an application running on Terminal Servers or Remote Desktop Servers have be inactive (i.e. no one using it), then the next user to launch the application will trigger the update for everyone else.

The App-V Streaming Server does not even need the updated version to publish. Once the updated package is fully in the Content share and the Package Detection Interval (the configured amount of time that the Streaming Server detects changes in the Content share) kicks in, it is served on next launch.

HTTP/FILE streaming is a little different – there is no middleman so the client makes a direct request for the SFT file. If the HREF is http://websvr/content/Visio/Visio.sft, the client asks specifically for that path even if there happens to be Visio_2.sft (version 2 of the package) in the same directory. The publishing information must be updated on the client by some other means.

An admin would have added the updated SFT and OSDs to Content and on the next Desktop Refresh the updated OSD with HREF=http://websvr/content/Visio/Visio_2.sft would come down and on the next launch the updates will stream. Still an active upgrade, but only after a refresh. NOTE: Streaming is not tied to a publishing method, so a refresh can be:

• App-V Management Server over RTSP
• IIS with ASP over HTTP (rare as you must code your own provisioning logic)
• MSI with MODE=STREAMING via ESD
• SFTMIME commands via ESD

Resources

• App-V Application Publishing and Client Interaction
• Methods for Upgrading or Updating Virtualized Applications
• App-V: Sequencing and Deploying Using MSI and Active Upgrade, a video from BriForum 2009
• How to Configure the App-V System for Package Upgrade
• How Do I: Updating and Upgrading a Sequenced Application Using Microsoft App-V?
• TechNet Virtual Lab: Learning App-V Intermediate Skills
• How to Use the Differential SFT File

App-V FAQ #24: Can I use Active Upgrade without RTSP(S)? is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Citrix Virtualization Solutions Meet Internationally Recognized Security Standards and Government Requirements

Summer is almost over and that means Synergy Berlin is nearly here!  We're busy making final arrangements for our first pan-European show to be held from October 6-8.  In advance of the program,  I want to draw your attention to my favourite part of the program - the Citrix Innovation Award. 

Every day, companies experience the tangible business benefits of virtualisation, networking and cloud computing. Benefits include savings in operating expenses, enhancing productivity and flexibility, cutting power consumption and reducing carbon emissions, to name a few. But there are also a number of organizations that have embraced the power of virtual computing to think about, and to do, business differently.  These include companies like Cocamar in Brazil that have used virtualisation technology to expand their market reach;  government agencies like Fairfax County, Virginia, that have used the technology to offer cloud-based computing services to cities and townships within the county; and ND SatCom that expanded its offerings to include a satellite-based solution for business continuity and connectivity. These are but a few examples of business innovation, and I know that there are thousands of stories about organisations around the world that have embraced virtual computing to spearhead change.

The Citrix Innovation Award highlights the stories of enterprises that are using virtualisation, networking and cloud technologies in exciting ways to drive innovation in their businesses. As we did for Synergy San Francisco, we've thrown open the doors for Synergy Berlin and invited everyone in the industry - partners, customers and employees - to nominate companies that are using virtualisation, networking and cloud technologies in innovative ways  to create a dynamic, agile business environment.

Once again, I'm amazed at the diverse range of businesses that implement these technologies, and use them in new and innovative ways.  Dozens of nominations were received from all over the globe; from those nominations twelve companies that best embody the spirit of the Innovation Award were shortlisted.

The winner is chosen by popular vote of peer organisations (that means all of you!) and members of the IT industry and will be announced at Synergy Berlin.

The full list of Innovation Award finalists is:

• Chemtura Corporation
• Codan Trygg-Hansa
• CZ Healthcare Insurance
• Derby Public Schools
• LG CNS
• MATERNA
• Medical University of South Carolina
• O'Neill Europe
• Perfetti Van Melle India
• Telecom Italia
• TeleComputing
• The Co-operative Group

Check out their stories of innovation and vote for your three favourites today.

And don't forget...you can still register for Synergy Berlin!  For more info go to www.citrixsynergy.com.

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Hi, Max Herrmann here again from the Remote Desktop Services team at Microsoft. Lots of news and activity this week at VMworld in San Francisco, including Microsoft’s open letter to VMware customers. Today, I wanted to discuss a question that is important to our large base of session virtualization customers: How do you decide between virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and session virtualization? And if you have already successfully deployed session virtualization, should you replace it with VDI?

Session virtualization is a centralized desktop computing architecture where multiple users share a single operating system and application image within individual sessions on a Windows Server host. Some key benefits of this architecture are streamlined desktop management, flexible access, and simplified regulatory compliance, all realized by routing the end users to a single desktop image in the datacenter. This sounds a lot like the promise of VDI, specifically of what some vendors, including Microsoft, refer to as (virtual) desktop pools.

This one-to-many relationship between a (more or less) static desktop image and a user population is possible today both with identically configured virtual desktop pools and with session virtualization. Both approaches make the most sense when personalization of the desktop or administrative access to the desktop is not critical for the user’s tasks, or not desirable from an IT support standpoint. This is often the case with so-called task workers, where high user productivity and providing users with a consistent and appropriate user experience specific to their task are important. So which technology—VDI with virtual desktop pools or session virtualization—should a customer deploy? The white paper that we recently published, Achieving Business Value through Microsoft VDI Together with Session Virtualization, provides you with some criteria to consider in your decision. Please also check out Michael’s blog on this subject; he argues that “… pooled VDI can be expensive and painful” – certainly when compared with session virtualization.

Now, what about “personal” virtual desktops: virtual desktops that are dedicated to specific users? What about those customers who deploy a combination of VDI and session virtualization? Well, with desktop virtualization, it always comes down to the use case and the worker profile you are targeting; there is really no one size fits all, and the white paper will actually provide some good, common sense guidance there as well.

The main point is that with Remote Desktop Services you don’t have to choose a single model. Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2008 R2 provides customers with a comprehensive platform to explore and deploy these different scenarios, while a whole ecosystem of Remote Desktop Services software and hardware partners provides powerful solutions designed to meet a much broader set of customer requirements. For example, while you could deploy Microsoft's inbox solution for virtual desktop pools on its own in low complexity environments, environments with higher complexity scale virtual desktop pools on top of Hyper-V should be implemented in conjunction with partner solutions such as Citrix XenDesktop. And, because a blog from me without the mention of Microsoft RemoteFX wouldn’t be complete, let me add that you can use products such as vWorkspace from Quest Software or PowerTerm WebConnect from Ericom today with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (now in beta) to experience and enhance a VDI or session virtualization environment with RemoteFX. Check out Ericom’s solution for managed access to RemoteFX desktops; you can find more information on their offering here. Or take a look at this RemoteFX demo which shows some of the work Quest have done to accelerate RemoteFX for the WAN.

If you haven’t already done so, I suggest that you download the beta of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, and familiarize yourself with the new virtualization capabilities in it. And make sure you give our partners’ solutions consideration as well, as they will undoubtedly make your life easier as you try and scale up your planned server-hosted desktop environment. As you conduct your evaluation, remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Sessions scale, while personal virtual desktops let you give your users more control. Use your own needs—not the limitations of a technology—to decide which model(s) fit(s) your business best.

I went kite fishing for the first time last week. Well, during this new adventure I got challenged by my teammates to relate kite fishing to XenDesktop, so this is my public reply to that challenge.

If you haven't gone kite fishing, I'll try to give you a brief explanation from a layman's perspective. Kite fishing is on the ocean and you fly a kite off the back of the boat. Attached to the kite line at intervals is a break-a-way loop that you run the fishing line through. The fishing line is then suspended from kite string with the bait in the water and the job of the fisherman is to keep the bait in the water by either letting out the fishing line when the kite goes higher or retracting the fishing line as the kite drops.

After carefully considering the experience, I came up with four areas where I saw similarities. First, I had never been kite fishing before and quite honestly, I would have never figured out how to kite fish without an experienced person to show me the ropes. Second, choosing the right kind of bait to attract the fish we were seeking required a specific knowledge of the fish diet. Third, setting up the kites and stringing the fishing lines didn't really require a lot of skill, but you had to have done it before - reading it from a book would not have worked for me. (They tried to explain it to me before they did it and I did not understand until I saw it occur). Finally, keeping the bait in the water was the key to getting a fish on the line.

Experienced Guidance

If this is your first time kite fishing, you want someone who had done it before to show you the ropes. Similarly, if this is your first time building or architecting a XenDesktop farm, you want someone knowledgeable to provide that guidance. As a XenDesktop architect with experience designing and architecting large farms, most of my blogs and whitepapers are targeted to providing you the information I believe is relevant to these tasks. In addition, Citrix has many partners (silver, gold, and platinum) and a professional services organization that are trained in XenDesktop design and deployment as well.

Customer Requirements

Selecting the right kind of live bait is key to a successful fishing trip. If the captain is unable to locate the right type of bait fish for the big fish his charter is seeking, he will not likely be successful. In most cases, an assessment should occur which provides input into the next phase. With fishing, the assessment is fairly simple since the captain just asks, "What kind of fish do you want to catch today?" From the conversations that I had, different type of fish required not only different bait, but different fishing techniques and different locations on the ocean. In much the same way, if you understand the customer's needs and long-term plans you can better design the XenDesktop farm. The XenDesktop assessment answers questions like "Where will the virtual desktops be accessed from?", " What applications will the users have?", and "What application virtualization platforms will be required?"

Setup and Installation

When feeding out the kite and the fishing lines, the whole environment must be configured in a specific order. With the kite going out first, followed by the first latch with the longest fishing line, then the second latch with the medium fishing line, and finally the short fishing line. If the correct process is not followed, it is likely the lines will get tangled and the first mate is not happy with you... Similarly, the XenDesktop farm needs to be installed and configured correctly to meet the customer requirements. Citrix provides many complimentary resources, such as the XenDesktop Checklist, the XenDesktop Quick PoC Kit, and XenDesktop Training. These items plus many resources are available from the XenDesktop website.

Fine Tuning the Environment

When kite fishing you need to work to keep the bait at a fairly consistent level in the water by playing out or retracting the fishing line based on the changing conditions. You have to account for the constantly changing distance between the free-flowing kite and the ocean waves as well as the direction the live bait chooses to swim. Now I know what a "fish out of water" looks like as it hangs from a kite, pretty funny really, but I digress. The skill comes in accurately judging the amount of line to release or reel in based on the environment. Much like fishing, once you get your XenDesktop environment up and running you will need to adjust for your user behavior. Things like desktop boot storms, user login storms, idle pool settings, patches, etc. all take a little bit of planning and adjustment after you get the environment into production.

If you are ever in the Miami area, I highly recommend Captain Nel Martinez of Top Gun Fishing Charters where I guarantee you will be well taken care of. If you are lucky, you will find some way to relate the trip to work and expense the whole thing.

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First off: if you are using the XenApp 6 SDK exclusively for scripting your farm actions and configuration, then this blog entry will not apply to you. If, however, you are a programmer and you wish to use the XenApp 6 SDK to build an application that interacts with XenApp, then you, my friend, are the target audience!

Note: Be sure you are using XenApp 6 SDK Version 6.1.2 when following along with this blog. The previous versions have bugs that prevent some of the programming features shown from working.

For those who have programmed against MFCOM in the past, programming against the PowerShell API is quite different. MFCOM exposes a COM API with an object model that can be traversed, from the IMetaFrameFarm interface, through an object hierarchy, eventually reaching the "leaf nodes" such as applications, servers, and sessions. Once you reach an object of interest, you call a method exposed by that object to perform an action. In PowerShell the approach is much more task-based. You start by choosing a task to perform, and then you either provide a wildcard to select objects that the task should operate on, or alternatively, pass objects into the task.

Another big change is that MFCOM calls are simply APIs that the programmer calls directly. In PowerShell, the approach is a bit more complicated. The programmer must:

1. Create a Runspace, with the relevant snap-ins loaded. This is relatively expensive; but assuming the Runspace executes on the local machine this can live for the lifetime of your program, and can be reused any time your program needs to execute PowerShell commands. (I'll get into remote Runspaces in a future blog about PowerShell Remoting.)
   
   
2. Create a Pipeline within the Runspace. Each time that you want to perform an atomic operation, you create a pipeline. A pipeline is equivalent to one command that you would type in the PowerShell command prompt.
   
   
3. Add either individual commands or a script to the Pipeline.
   
   
4. Invoke the Pipeline. When you call this method, you can optionally pass objects in, and it returns the objects that are output from the commands or script in the pipeline.
   
   
5. Convert the objects that are output from the pipeline (which are all of type System.Management.Automation.PSObject) back into concrete .NET types.

When developing the XenApp 6 SDK, we recognized that this is quite a lot of effort, especially when you just want to do something simple. We also recognized that there is potential for errors because the command names, parameter names, and object property names are all just strings. It is easy to make a mistake and enter "Enalbed" instead of "Enabled", and you won't find that error until you actually run the program. Therefore, to make development easier and more robust, we have implemented a set of SDK "wrappers" that simplify programming against the XenApp SDK.

The first thing we provide is a simple, predefined "default" runspace for executing Citrix commands. This runspace will have the Citrix.XenApp.Commands and Citrix.Common.Commands snap-ins already loaded, and it is created on demand and lives for the lifetime of your application. You can reuse it as often as you need; the only limitation is that you should ensure that multi-threaded applications do not try to execute multiple commands within the runspace at the same time.

To use the default runspace, reference the System.Management.Automation.dll assembly from the Microsoft SDK and the Citrix.Management.Automation.dll assembly, which can typically be found at "C:\Program Files\Citrix\XenApp Server SDK\bin". Add "using" references to the following namespaces:

using System.Management.Automation;
using System.Management.Automation.Runspaces;
using Citrix.Management.Automation;

Then, use the static property CitrixRunspaceFactory.DefaultRunspace:

Runspace runspace = CitrixRunspaceFactory.DefaultRunspace;

Note that there is also a method called CitrixRunspaceFactory.CreateLocalRunspace() that creates another runspace with the Citrix snap-ins loaded. You can use this in the rare case that you need multiple local runspaces, for instance to handle multiple threads.

Now that you have a Runspace, you need a Pipeline. PowerShell makes this trivial, so we do not provide a wrapper for this. Simply call the method CreatePipeline() on the runspace instance. The return value is a Pipeline object:

Pipeline pipeline = runspace.CreatePipeline();

Into the pipeline you need to add one or more instances of System.Management.Automation.Runspaces.Command. To simplify the creation of Command objects, we provide an assembly that has classes capable of automatically generating them, pre-populated with XenApp 6 SDK PowerShell commands. This assembly is Citrix.XenApp.Sdk.dll and can be found in the same directory where Citrix.Management.Automation.dll is located. You will also find Citrix.Common.Sdk.dll which is the analogous assembly for the cmdlets in the Citrix.Common.Commands snap-in.

To use the Citrix.XenApp.Sdk.dll assembly, add a reference to it and a "using" statement for it:

using Citrix.XenApp.Sdk;

If you use the Visual Studio object browser to inspect the contents of Citrix.XenApp.Sdk.dll, you will find that it contains classes matching every XenApp 6 PowerShell SDK cmdlet, and every parameter set of those cmdlets. For example, there is a class matching the cmdlet Get-XAApplication with the parameter set "ByName"; this class is named GetXAApplicationByName. It has properties named BrowserName and Command (among others). You use this class by creating an instance of it, setting the properties as you would set the parameter values on the PowerShell command line, then getting the value of the Command property. This returns an instance of the PowerShell Command object, already set up to execute the cmdlet represented by the class' state. You can add one or more of those Command objects to the pipeline you created.

For example, to create a Command that gets all applications whose names match the pattern "A*", you can do:

var getAppByName = new GetXAApplicationByName { BrowserName = new[] {"A*"} };
Command command = getAppByName.Command;

The reason that the BrowserName property is an array is that the PowerShell command can accept multiple inputs, even on the command line.

Add the commands to the pipeline using the pipeline's Commands.Add method:

pipeline.Commands.Add(command);

Once the pipeline contains the command(s) that you want to execute, you invoke it. The pipeline has an Invoke method, which you can optionally pass objects into. This works as you would expect it to, if you are familiar with piping objects into commands via the PowerShell command-line. The Invoke method also returns a list of objects, which are the output of the commands in the pipeline:

var output = pipeline.Invoke();

The next step is to take those objects from the output and convert them back into concrete .NET types. The objects as returned are all of type System.Management.Automation.PSObject which can be used as a type of generic property bag; that is, you can get and set properties within it, referencing those properties by name. For example, you can get the value of an application's DisplayName property using (keeping in mind the output of pipeline.Invoke is a collection):

foreach (var app in output)
{
// 'app' is an instance of PSObject
Console.WriteLine("DisplayName: {0}", app.Properties["DisplayName"]);
}

(I apologize for the lack of indent; I can't get an indent to show here.)

However, we do not wish to reference properties by name. It is too easy to make a mistake and introduce a bug that is not found until you run the application. You really want to use a concrete, typesafe .NET type to store the output objects.

You will need a definition of the types that are output from the cmdlets. You can find these types defined in an assembly named Citrix.XenApp.Commands.Data.dll, and in the equivalent Citrix.Common.Commands.Data.dll for the Citrix.Common.Commands snap-in. Add a reference to that assembly, and a "using" statement for it:

using Citrix.XenApp.Commands;

There are a couple of options as to how to convert the PSObject values into concrete types. One option is to use the PSObject.BaseObject property, and cast it to an SDK type.

XAApplication xaApp = (XAApplication) app.BaseObject;
Console.WriteLine("DisplayName: {0}", xaApp.DisplayName);

This approach works, but only when the object is actually of the type that you are requesting. Rarely, what you will get from the pipeline is really a pseudo-type; one that has all of the same properties as the type you expect, but which is not actually an instance of the type you expect. This happens when some cmdlet in the pipeline must serialize the type. Typically this happens when using PowerShell remoting, or when using the Export-CliXml and Import-CliXml cmdlets.

To help you handle these pseudo-types, we have created a method that can convert them back into a XenApp SDK type. This method is implemented as an extension method on the PSObject type, named ConvertTo<T>():

XAApplication xaApp = app.ConvertTo<XAApplication>();
Console.WriteLine("DisplayName: {0}", xaApp.DisplayName);

This method is smart enough to do a direct cast if possible, otherwise, it will try very hard to convert the properties contained in the PSObject into the properties of an instance of the type you specify. I therefore recommend always using this method rather than just casting the BaseObject property.

You may wonder how you know what type the objects are that a cmdlet will output. This information is available in the cmdlet help; however, we have also built in some assistance here. If you used one of the "Command generator" classes in the Citrix.XenApp.Sdk.dll assembly, for instance the GetXAApplicationByName class, you will find it contains a method named ParseResult. This method takes in a list of PSObjects, and returns a list of the objects of the proper type which is expected to be output from that cmdlet. So you can rewrite the loop that handles the output as:

foreach (var app in getAppByName.ParseResult(output))
{
// 'app' is now an instance of XAApplication
Console.WriteLine("DisplayName: {0}", app.DisplayName);
}

At this point, everything is typesafe, and the invocation steps are quite straightforward. The entire sample looks like this:

Runspace runspace = CitrixRunspaceFactory.DefaultRunspace;
Pipeline pipeline = runspace.CreatePipeline();
var getAppByName = new GetXAApplicationByName { BrowserName = new[] {"A*"} };
Command command = getAppByName.Command;
pipeline.Commands.Add(command);
var output = pipeline.Invoke();
foreach (var app in getAppByName.ParseResult(output))
{
// 'app' is now an instance of XAApplication
Console.WriteLine("DisplayName: {0}", app.DisplayName);
}

Hopefully you will agree, this is getting pretty simple and straightforward. But we still didn't like that it takes several lines of code to execute a simple command. So, we added extension methods to the Runspace type which make this even easier. The methods are called ExecuteCommand and ExecutePipeline. These methods are not quite as powerful as doing all of the steps yourself; for instance, you cannot add arbitrary PowerShell commands, only those that are part of the XenApp 6 SDK. But they are extremely simple.

Runspace runspace = CitrixRunspaceFactory.DefaultRunspace;
var apps = runspace.ExecuteCommand(new GetXAApplicationByName { BrowserName = new[] {"A*"} });
foreach (var app in apps)
{
Console.WriteLine("DisplayName: {0}", app.DisplayName);
}

That's all there is to it! We have tried to make programming against the XenApp 6 SDK as easy as scripting against it, and I hope that it is straightforward enough to enable 3rd party developers to leverage our SDK to create some really amazing applications as they have done in the past with MFCOM!

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Share 0savesSave The enterprise application store? Really?

Citrix calls Dazzle, it’s self-service “iTunes”-style appstore for your published applications, an “enterprise application store” .

Is that accurate though?

In reality, it’s PNAgent  (or the XenApp Online Plug-in for those new to all this) with some flash animation and freedom as to what you add to your start menu.

Lets look at what Dazzle currently does, or doesn’t do:

• There is no single-sign on. You are prompted to re-enter your desktop credentials when you launch it. A real pain.
• It only gives you what you already have access to via your AD group memberships.
• It only provides access to XenApp/XenDesktop hosted applications or desktops. It doesn’t integrate with other distribution mechanisms (e.g. SCCM) to allow on-demand deployments of other applications (not all apps can be streamed after all)
• If you want something new, you’ve still got to make a call to the help desk, who then initiate whatever approval workflow is in place (outside of Dazzle)

At Synergy earlier this year, Citrix announced that the next version of Dazzle with have more workflow capabilities.

Dazzle v.next – the story so far

What have Citrix told us so far?

• Some kind of integration with Workflow Studio (is this just going to be adding/removing users to AD groups?). Hmm..does anyone actually use Workflow Studio?
• Managerial approval for application access requests
• Mac support
• Application searching
• FAQ support (hooking into your help desk knowledge base of application problems so users can find the answer themselves before calling?)

What should Dazzle offer?

Here is my “Dazzling” shopping list:

• Allow an administrator to define a list of available applications
• Define how a user gains access to them (all the time, by instant approval, by managerial approval)
• Provide reports on who has access to what, and who uses what (some kind of Edgesight integration for reporting?)
• Provide approval mechanisms via email and web
• Single sign-on
• Integrate with SCCM for on-demand deployment of MSIs and access to locally-installed applications in the same manner

What would you like to see in the next release of Dazzle? Comment away…

It's been a while since my last blog.  In the last couple of months, we have been very busy preparing some fixes to the XenApp PowerShell SDK.  I'm happy to announce the immediate availability of Version 6.1.2 of the PowerShell SDK.  Since we never really explained the differences with previous versions, here's a recap:

• Version 6.0.0 is the version that shipped with XenApp 6.0.  Yes, that's correct: the SDK was there from launch day!  We did not have a unified help file, start menu shortcuts, and complete help for the Group Policy Provider available in this version.  But on a vanilla XenApp 6 deployment you can start Powershell, add the Citrix snap-ins, and start using the Powershell SDK without any further installation.
• Version 6.1.0 is the first version that was available for download.  This release was primarily intended to help out administrators by providing more thorough and simpler-to-use help.
• Version 6.1.1 was released shortly after 6.1.0, and it fixed a bug that affected programmers.  In 6.1.0 the Citrix.XenApp.Sdk assembly, which simplifies programmatic SDK usage, did not work as intended and did not match the documentation.  This release did not affect administrators that use the cmdlets for scripting only.
• Version 6.1.2, released today, fixes a bug that prevented the Edgesight agent from working when the 6.1.x versions of the SDK are installed.  It also helps programmers using the SDK, by enabling better cross-version portability of programs written and linked against the XenApp SDK.  Now, programs that leverage the XenApp PowerShell SDK are forward-compatible so that, for example, programs built against version 6.0.0, 6.1.0, or 6.1.1 will work when installed on a system with SDK version 6.1.2 installed.

If you have downloaded the XenApp SDK in the past, I encourage you to update to the latest version.  Those using the SDK as a programmer's API are especially impacted by these updates.

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The new carbon look is something you like or you don't.

The problem is that many customers may need to have a white theme for marketing / logo integration purposes.

I've been used to release white themes for Web Interface but I've stopped mainly because Citrix was releasing their owns.

After waiting for a while, and as I needed White Themes for Web Interface 5.3 and Access Gateway Enterprise 5.2, I've decided to create them.

So if you want to replace the carbon look by a white one, you just have to ...

I'm often asked why I'm so passionate about Dazzle, so I thought I'd blog about the origins of Dazzle, and help explain why I think this approach gives a better user experience and reduced cost.

Like the vast majority of Citrites, I use our software pretty extensively - and like most with a technical bent, I tend to use the early pre-alpha buggy stuff with all the extra goodness. It was one particular incident with this that lead directly to the first brain storming around Dazzle.

At the time I was in the middle of an important set of off-site meetings and my laptop and the pre-alpha software I was using was working well. Now it is never good to tempt the gods of software, but that is exactly what my "nanny knows best" software chose to do - it reconfigured my world - and in the process broke it.

Now all software can have bugs (especially early stuff) but the frustration I had wasn't so much caused by the bug, but by a case of poor timing by 'the system'. We have all seen people trying to avoid this - turning off virus scanning, avoiding networks - even refusing to logoff or power down incase that lurking update happens just before you get on a plane/enter the board meeting or whatever.

This particular incident propelled me into writing up a set of rules as to how the client software should behave. Here it is:

• "Don't remove (or update) software without asking"
  Users need confidence that if software worked yesterday it should continue to work today.

• "Don't give me stuff I don't want"
  We all have to cope with the clutter of junkware we don't want - and one person's "really useful app" is another person's junk.

• "Citrix apps should behave like local apps"
  This was nearly true before Dazzle, but not quite - and every minor difference leads to helpdesk calls and user frustration.

These three things were the original motivation behind 'Anthem' - or Dazzle as it later became. The idea resonated with the 'simpler' and 'user empowerment' camps, and fitted in with ideas of reducing IT costs, both through less support (because the user is in control) and lower software cost - if users only get the software they want, IT gets higher visibility over what is needed, and can reduce the amount they over provision.

Of course this was just the start of Dazzle, and I'll be talking about what else it does (and why) at Synergy in Berlin in talk SYN317 - Dazzle and Receiver vs. ICA clients - what's the difference, why it matters and how to make the move. I'll be joined by Simon Frost, the architect for Receiver who will be explaining how Receiver can make life simpler for the user whilst giving IT sufficient control to ensure that each user has exactly the right client side infrastructure and configuration, across a diverse world of Windows, Mac and other devices.

Hope to see you there.

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After using WordPress for the SynergyBerlin.com site, I decided I like it so much I’d change my other sites over to it.

Also, as I’ve now almost completed my Citrix Integration Architect series of exams, a name change was in order.

The site layout and navigation is still very much work in progress, but I’ve migrated some recent content in from the old Drupal-based blog so it didn’t look bare!

Now I just to get back to writing some decent informative updates again!

Yesterday at VMworld I endured sitting through a mind numbing session hosted by VMware End User Computing (formerly desktop) CTO, Scott Davis. This was a session where Scott made bold erroneous claims and assertions which I tweeted about. Then I saw this tweet from @claytonprice

claytonprice: Where do I find the desktop panel discussion featuring Scott Davis and @harrylabana? I can't find it in the schedule! #vmworld

I responded "he's scared" in jest. However as I think about this, I wonder if this is true. Earlier this year Brian Madden asked me if I would be willing to have an open debate at BriForum about the desktop on a panel that would include Scott Davis and myself. I agreed to it, but Scott apparently declined and instead opted to present a riveting session on his future vision which was met with thunderous ZZZZZZZZZZZ.

In today's 90 minute VMworld keynote, a generous 10 minutes was granted to talk about the desktop. We learned VMware CTO Steven Herrod likes to play a lot of Minesweeper. He also asserted that Windows was not very relevant and that the desktop of the future is all SaaS based. Hmm feels a lot like the Citrix Dazzle strategy extended to SaaS, but with the delusion that Windows is not relevant. Nonetheless a good discussion to have.

So since this is VMworld, and the desktop is important to VMware, let's arrange to have a public discussion on the topic, no need for canned PR scripts. Let's talk about the desktop today and the desktop of tomorrow. Perhaps if they are willing we can have Brian Madden or Chris Wolf moderate at a neutral location? We're all here in San Francisco so we can even arrange some logistics now.

The question is, Scott are you up to discussing the desktop or do we continue to listen to fantasy's of desktops morphing into SaaS based applications everywhere and Windows going away?

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Ok, so maybe that's a little strong. After all, it takes a bit more planning than simply declaring that VDI is implemented! I've been considering VDI at Westminster College for quite some time, but have had two major stumbling blocks: Cost. I simply couldn't get the economics to work. At the very least, I need to see break even on the upfront costs when compared with replacing a slew of PCs. more...

Consider the following diagram. In it, you will see a very minimal (and probably too minimal) cabling diagram for a single vSphere host. At the left hand side of the diagram is a server with four NICs/HBAs. In reality, you'll probably have a lot more than four, but for simplicity sake, let's keep it at two 10 GbE NICs and two Fibre Channel HBAs. more...