Hi all,
We stream most of our ThinApps from a central server cluster because it's so easy to upgrade all users at one time from an old to a new version. In addition, we want to make several of our enterprise-licensed applications available to anyone from any computer. The problem we're left with is that our end users have to browse out to a network share and dig through dozens of virtual applications to find the one they want. When they get there, there is sometimes confusion about which file to run (exe, dat, vbs, etc).
So, I've written a little .NET application that reads an XML list of all of our ThinApps and populates a TreeView with the appropriate icon, title, and tooltip for each application. End users can run this one program to get a quick look at all the ThinApps and then double click on the one they want to launch it. So far, so good.
The next step was to ThinApp the .NET application because, after all, I don't want to have to install it on every computer. I'd much rather use a group policy to deliver a desktop shortcut of this application to all computers and have a single entry point for all virtual apps.
Here's where the problem comes in. When I ThinApp my utility I can no longer double-click on my TreeView item to launch the corresponding ThinApp. Behind the scenes the utility is simply trying to execute: Process.Start("Z:\ThinApps\AppName\App.exe") But when I double-click, nothing happens. I ran Log Monitor and found this entry: CreateProcessW app='Z:\ThinApps\AppName\App.exe' cmdline='"Z:\ThinApps\AppName\App.exe" ' -> 0 (** failed) (h=0x0, pid=0x0) *
So I'm left wondering if there is any way to make this work. It seems to me there must be some way to do this. After all, you can have multiple ThinApps running at the same time so you should be able to tell the application to launch using an external command or something.
If anyone has any ideas I would love to hear them.
~spence