By Shawn Bass on Wednesday, November 28, 2007 5:21:14 PM

Aaron Parker posted a follow up article to his initial work in trying to get Adobe Acrobat 8 as a virtualized package under SoftGrid.  It seems as though Aaron has decided that it's just not going to be practical to deploy Acrobat via SoftGrid as there are a lot of technical issues that involve separation of the app and it's not practical for real world deployment.  What's interesting about this is that Aaron was able to get Acrobat 8 working in Altiris SVS.

By Shawn Bass on Wednesday, November 28, 2007 1:48:11 PM

For those who are using Citrix Installation Manager as a deployment strategy for MSI packages and hotfixes, etc. you should be aware that if you deploy HRP01 for PS4.5 and then attempt to deploy MSI packages that include transforms (MST files) the installation via IM will fail.  Citrix has a private hotfix named PSE450R01W2K3021.msp that resolves this issue.  However, there's still a number of issues which are:

1) The fact that this is still a private hotfix and it came out in August 2007.  Come on Citrix, where's the final public hotfix for this thing already?

2) The fact that it's private and most people don't know that it exists.

3) The fact that it seems to be invalidated by newer hotfixes.  I've done test deployments of hotfix numbers greater than 21, and it seems from my testing that if you don't deploy limited release hotfix 21 at the very end of your Citrix hotfixes, then you lose the ability to de ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 3:15:25 PM

Brian Kelly has posted a two part series titled "SoftGrid Operations Guide" on the SoftGrid Team Blog.  This two part guide covers some topics that would be useful to any SoftGrid admin such as moving a Softgrid datastore, publishing apps in Citrix, how to preload applications, etc.  Check out Part 1 and Part 2.

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 1:21:43 PM

Aaron Parker has a great blog entry on trying to get Adobe Acrobat 8 sequenced via Softgrid.  He's solved the issue of separating out the print driver install and also figured out the SxS/manifest issues.  However, the bad news is that there are several thing that are not working properly with the app. 

Let's hope he makes some more progress as I'm sure there are lots of people interested in getting that app to work virtualized.

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 8:29:11 AM

As indicated by Justin Zarb, the SoftGrid ooops Microsoft Application Virtualization Team has posted some good details about how dynamic suite composition (similar to contexting or inter-isolation communication or whatever you want to call one virtual environment that's able to talk to another virtual environment) works.  Read the TechNet forum post over here for more details.

By Shawn Bass on Monday, November 26, 2007 10:40:41 AM

Al has put together a decent review of VDI technology and compares the current offerings from VMware vs that of Citrix.  It's a nice read.

By Shawn Bass on Monday, November 26, 2007 10:16:28 AM

While this whitepaper is coming from a vendor and is partial to their profile management solution, it's still a very nice review of the Windows Profile Management headaches and provides info on how the sepagoProfile solution resolves this issues.  It's definitely a nice read.

By Shawn Bass on Wednesday, November 21, 2007 11:46:38 AM

I'm moving my existing RSS feed as I'm changing modules out that supplies my RSS feed.  To prevent this kind of thing from happening again, I've setup a 301 permanent redirect of http://www.shawnbass.com/rss.aspx which will permanently link to my RSS feed no matter where I decide to relocate it in the future.  For now, it will move to FeedBurner, but the above link is what you should point your readers to.

By Shawn Bass on Monday, November 19, 2007 3:51:18 PM

Brian Madden has recommitted himself to completing the upcoming CPS 4.5 book.  Brian is approaching this book in a slightly different approach than previous books.  In the new CPS 4.5 book, Brian will be writing chapters and releasing them online immediately in a brand new content management system built by Brian's web developers.  This will allow for immediate release of new information, as well as corrections and community feedback.  To this end, Brian has released Chapter 3: Network architecture.

By Shawn Bass on Sunday, November 18, 2007 7:12:34 AM

A client of mine is just putting in Secure Gateway 3.0 with WI4.6 (and PNA).  I noticed that they didn't have Session Reliability enabled and I was going to set it up for them.  I noticed that they didn't have any hotfixes for Secure Gateway 3.0 (which is a no-no since you'll have problems connecting in with newer ICA Clients 9.2+ when using Session Reliability).  Citrix fixed the issue with the hotfix SGE300W003 (CTX110661), but that hotfix was later superceded by SGE300W008 - CTX114059.  So you go off and download CTX114059 and attempt to apply it to your Secure Gateway 3.0 setup.  During the installation the hotfix stops and tries to restart the Secure Gateway service.  However, you receive an Error 1920 from Windows Installer stating that it's unable to start the Secure Gateway Service. ... Read More »