September 2, 2009 - Sven Huisman

VMworld 2009: ThinApp upcoming features

Today I went to a session about upcoming features for ThinApp. Some interesting features were shown and I will discuss those in this post:

Protocol Handlers:
Protocols are things like http: and mailto:
ThinApp recognizes protocols during capture and includes information in package.ini

Example for Outlook 2007
Protocols=feed;feeds;mailto;Outlook.URL.feed;Outlook.URL.mailto;
Outlook.URL.stssync;Outlook.URL.webcal;outlookfeed;outlookfeeds;
stssync;webcal;webcals

When applications are registered on a desktop via thinreg or .msiwrapper, protocols will be registered.

New management SDK:
– Open thinApp package files
– Query registry key values
– Open file version information from internal EXE  files
– Obtain a list of files, sizes and attributes

VMware ThinApp autopackager:
The autopackager was really cool. It can automatically create ThinApp packages of a bunch of applications. What it does is:

– Startup VM’s on ESX
– Takes snapshot
– Package software
– Copy Project-folder

It packages multiple applications simultaneously (depending on the number of VM’s) and the demo showed 13 applications ThinApped in 30 minutes (including Office 2003, which took the longest).

Windows 7 support will probably in the beta release coming this November. GA will be Q1 2009.

What was also pretty cool was the fact that Thinstall-helper was mentioned during the presentation. I once worked on a ThinApp project together with the developer of Thinstallhelper. The funny thing was that in the presentation it was called ThinApphelper, including a screenshot.

Virtual Applications / VMworld 2009 SF Thinapp / ThinstallHelper / VMware / VMworld 2009 /

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