VMware ThinApp Blog

 Lakshmana Prakash
ThinApp Packaging Consultant
ThinApp Community: Lakshman
lprakash@vmware.com
 
 
Problem:
 
During initial launch of the ThinApp EXE, a new sandbox is created, which holds the runtime 
modification of the application. After an uninstall of the ThinApp software the sandbox is not 
deleted. 

White Paper on
ThinApp Conditional Install

Lakshmana Prakash
ThinApp Packaging Consultant
ThinApp Community: Lakshman
lprakash@vmware.com

Problem:

In general, there are many applications that might have been designed to work in a specific environment. Typical environments consist of the following:

1. Operating System Version (e.g. Windows 7 or Windows XP)
2. Operating system Service Packs (e.g. Windows XP SP3 or Windows Vista SP1)
3. Operating System Type (e.g Windows XP 32 bit or Windows 7 64 bit)

When capturing those applications, it is necessary to make sure that the ThinApp is
installed for that specific environment, by checking the system.

Within your ThinApp project can you configure it to create one single self-containing file or to break out the Data Container into a separate file so you end up having one or multiple Entry Points and one Data Container file, together acting as your whole package (more details on Entry Points and Data Containers).. 
What does this mean when we want to use In-Place Updates (also known as Side-By-Side or Integer Updates) on the package?

In-place updates (also called integer update or side-by-side update) is one of ThinApp’s strongest features when it comes to deploy updates to a package in full production with zero downtime (more details on different update mechanism can be found here).
During an In-Place update discussion with Steven Storrs @ Atos came we up with the following scenario I never had thought about before.. Let me explain it with a step by step demonstration..We’ll use my favorite packaged software, Mozilla Firefox for demonstration purposes..

VMware and eEye have developed an integrated security solution for our customers running VMware’s ThinApp application virtualization technology. With this integrated solution, you are now able to include ThinApp-deployed applications as part of your overall security strategy – something that wasn’t possible before. And it's only available from eEye and VMware.

With the latest release of eEye Retina, security teams are given unprecedented levels of visibility to manage vulnerabilities in virtualized environments to:

• Reduce risk by ensuring VMware ThinApp applications are properly discovered and are part of standard vulnerability management processes
• Increase visibility and automate vulnerability assessment for VMware ThinApp packages
• Complement existing Retina capabilities in securing ESX and ESXi virtual machines

Get ready for application virtualization with VMware ® ThinApp ® !

Recently I was asked if there was a way to pin ThinApp packages to the Start Menu and Taskbar in Win 7. Well, depending upon what your desired outcome is, there are both long and short answers.

Let's dig into them here...

By following the examples below, it is possible to add 'Right Click' functionality, or Shell Extensions, to your ThinApp packages.  In this way you can use Windows Explorer to send paths and file names as arguments to ThinApp executables before they launch. 

Just to clarify.. ThinApp will not magically make an application run on Windows 7 if it is not supported on Windows 7. That said, we do offer some help with ThinApp. Great examples are Internet Explorer 6, Adobe Reader 5 and Lotus Notes 6.5.6. All not running natively on Win7 but does so with the help of ThinApp. It may be tricky to find the solution and there are no guaranties. The work around is often to include older Windows XP dlls into the package and that might make the application run on Win7.

We blogged about this back in 2009 but with all the Windows 7 migrations going on it is time to emphasize the importance of the blog post.

The method discussed here: http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2009/03/common-system32-dlls.html will help you to run many Windows XP legacy applications on Windows 7 even though they do not run natively installed on Win7. Adding MSVCP50.dll to a project helped me out just the other day.

Make sure you are using ThinApp version 4.5 or later. We added support for Windows 7 in version 4.5 so using an older version will not work.

Perhaps one of the hottest use cases for ThinApp currently is virtualizing Internet Explorer 6. I have found a somewhat generic fix to make integration between virtualized IE6 and locally installed applications. The fix is discussed in a previous blog post (http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2010/03/how-to-resolve-send-to-email-issues-from-applications-like-reflection.html) but might not be that obvious.