Virtually Jason

When you install ThinApp, it includes several utilities that are very useful for manipulating and troubleshooting your ThinApp packages. One of them is vregtool, which I’m going to discuss today. Vregtool allows you to examine and manipulate the registry for a ThinApp. Why would you need this when you can simply embed Regedit inside your package and use a tool with which you’re already familiar? Well, vregtool can be used to examine .tvr files, like the registry change files that get stored in the sandbox. What this means is that you can start up a ThinApp, change some setting and then examine exactly what registry change was made to reflect that setting change. That can make it very easy to cherry pick the application settings that you want to embed within your package, vs. those that you want to leave out. Perhaps the concrete example of my use case will help this to make sense. A customer recently had me package Office 2007 for use in their VDI environment. Office 2007 i...

A customer recently asked me to deploy Microsoft Office 2010 (KMS Licensed) to their 64 bit Windows 7 VDI desktops and so, after a little work, I was able to get a working ThinApp package. As an added difficulty, we are using a Floating Pool and so have redirected the users’ %appdata% to a file share on an SMB2 NAS device (so we’ve disabled SMB2 in Windows 7 until a ThinApp release where this doesn’t cause issues). Here are the steps that I followed, mostly taken from the excellent blog entry that VMware put together (http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2011/02/quick-start-guide-for-deploying-office-2010-using-thinapp-461.html). I began this procedure with ThinApp 4.6.1, moved to 4.6.2 and have now run it with 4.7. 1) Prepare a clean capture machine. I use 32 bit Windows XP for my capture machine and have come across licensing issues when capturing on Windows 7 32 bit. 2) Perform the prescan 3) Install Microsoft Office, selecting a Custom Install and (people recommend ensur...