IMHO, Reflector is probably the single most important .NET software development tool next to Visual Studio itself.  Don't believe me?  See Scott Hanselman's "The Big 10 Life and Work-Changing Utilities" list from 2007.  I use it constantly when trying to decompile someone's existing .NET code to fix a bug or rewrite it, etc.

So today I got an email in my inbox today from Lutz Roeder mentioning that he was ceasing development and that the tool was being taken over by Red Gate Software.  Before I make any comments, I'd like to first express my gratitude to Lutz for 8 long years of development on a tool that he shared with everyone for free.  The tool has been indispensible to me over the years.

Now on to my thoughts:

First I think that something like Reflector might be best served by being opened up to the open source community rather than existing within the realm of a commercial entity.  That being said, Red Gate software has already agreed to continue making a community edition of Reflector (and plugins) available for free from it's website.  While I always question the motivation of a commercial entity behind free versions of software, I also have a lot of respect for Red Gate software as they make some really cool tools.  My personal hopes are that they do continue development of Reflector and continue to increase the features in the community version that they make available for free.  I just hope they don't require people to purchase in order to get new features.

...

Read More »

A client of mine has standardized on Virtual PC 2007 for desktop virtual machine needs (not for their VDI or Server VMs, but just simple desktop VM needs).  They recently created a transform for customizing the default install, but after deployment noticed that there was one major issue with the package.  The issue is that VPC picks a subfolder of "My Documents" named "My Virtual Machines" as it's default store location when creating a new virtual machine.  This would obviously be a very bad choice when using Group Policy enforced managed folder redirection (just imagine how slow the VMs would be if they were stored on the network!, not to mention issues around home drive quotas, etc).  Anyway, the packaging team couldn't find an option in the app, nor a registry setting anywhere to change the default folder location for this.  Also, since we're dealing with a network location, you can't get by with a subst command or junction point.  While I didn't know the answer myself, I figured Google might.  After a quick...

Read More »

Daniel Feller from the Citrix Worldwide Consulting Solutions group has posted a nice set of Visio Stencils for the new Citrix Delivery Center components.  This includes visio shapes for all the new XenApp branded components as well as XenDesktop, XenServer, Password Manager, Netscaler, WANscaler, Branch Repeater, etc.  I definitely recommend picking up a copy if you frequently do Visio diagrams of Citrix infrastructure components.  And thanks to Daniel for sharing this with the community.

I received an email yesterday that I was nominated and approved for a Microsoft MVP in Terminal Services.  What can I say other than I'm honored to be included in such a great group of people who contribute so much to the community at large.  Thanks to everyone for their support.  My MVP page can be found here.  One of these days (when I get free time) I'll actually update my profile to include all the relevant info.  Also, Congrats to the other new Terminal Server MVPs:  Seung Heun Noh: Terminal Server: Engineering, Greg Shields: Terminal Server: Author, and Joe Shonk: Terminal Server: Architecture.  

Read More »

The age old question of whether or not you should virtualize a Citrix server.  It use to be a diffcult question because the virtualization platforms were not very optimized for a Terminal Server workload.  Many things have changed in this regard, and now it's not such a crazy decision anymore.  There are certain use cases where it's a no brainer (license servers, web interface, secure gateway, etc).  However, for pure Presentation Servers it was always a bit of a toss up.  On one hand you have a situation where you know you're going to get less users than on physical hardware, versus the other side that says since 32-bit Windows is limited to 2 GB of kernel memory, then virtualizing some Citrix servers on a 16GB or 32GB server carved up into several Terminal Server VMs will scale more users than a single physical instance on th equivalent server hardware.  But that's comparing a physical install using 32-bit Windows, not 64-bit.  Still, it does make a lot of sense to at least consider virtualizing your Terminal...

Read More »

I recently came across this blog entry posted on the App-V blog stating that Process Monitor was recently updated to support the new App-V Release Candidate that was just released last week.  You can get version 1.35 of Process Monitor here.   Also, did you know that you can launch the SysInternals tools directly from the web by visiting live.sysinternals.com  Check it out, it's pretty helpful.

Al Solorzano recently posted a nice article on Group Policy Preferences over here.  If you're not familiar with Group Policy Preferences, it's the technology that Microsoft acquired from Desktop Standard.  GPP is a nice way of extending management reach to registry settings that were previously not able to be managed by Group Policy (at least not without those PITA Administrative Templates anyway).  There's also some powerful capabilities for filtering that are largely lacking from Group Policy.  While out at Citrix Synergy a little over a week ago, I had the pleasure of some great conversation with Al at a group dinner outing.  Al is extremely knowledgable about a variety of technologies and I highly recommend following his blog (if you don't already).  Al's blog can be found here.

Vishal Ganeriwala from Citrix has recently posted a blog entry about a social networking contest that's being conducted at the Citrix Synergy event next week in Houston.  If you happen to be attending, here's how the process goes:

You comment on Vishal's blog entry stating that you'd like to borrow one of the FlipVideo cameras. You record some 5 minute video segment capturing your thoughts (or someone elses if you don't have any LOL) regarding the Citrix Synergy event. You turn the camera back into Vishal the following day. All the videos get uploaded to YouTube. The top 5 most viewed submissions will receive the FlipVideo camera for free....

Read More »

Justin Zarb recently blogged about a video he found from a TechEd session where John Sheehan gave an overview of the new features in SoftGrid / MAV 4.5.  I'd love to give all sort of nice comments about the video, but I'm plagued by the Silverlight Download Error 4001 so I can't even watch the video.  Anyway, I'm passing it along in case you haven't seen Justin's blog entry about it.

Microsoft has officially re-released Windows XP Service Pack 3 today.  Get the full download here.