Terminal Services Application Compatibility

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Now available at the Connect site. This tool was released as beta sometime back, I came across while I was browsing through the connection directory few days back, I thought it would be useful for lot of IT Pro's.

TS Application Compatibility is aimed at creating tools, guidelines and an eco-system for improving the reliability of applications on terminal services.

What is Application Compatibility for TS?

Application Compatibility is the term given to the collection of issues which prevent an application from executing satisfactorily in a given environment. In this specific instance, the environment is the Windows Terminal Services (TS) Platform. TS is deployed for a variety of reasons such as reducing total cost of operation (TCO), better security & compliance, enabling mobility, etc.

Following are the different types of Problems faced by client applications on a TS environment:

  1. It is observed that client applications are generally written for a single user. TS server being a multiuser system, may cause synchronization problems.

  2. Some of the applications are written with the assumption that the binaries are running with administrator privileges. On TS, a normal user is rarely given administrative privileges.

  3. Behaviour of some of the APIs is different  in  TS server environment than a client OS environment, this may cause the program to get unexpected results from some of the OS calls.

TS Application Analyzer

TS Application Analyzer is a runtime program analysis tool to enable administrators/users to determine if they can deploy an application on TS with a degree of confidence. It provides a summary of TS incompatible behavior of an application and provides recommendation indicating the confidence level for deploying the application on TS. The classes of App Compat issues that are being targeted for detection are:

  1. Shared resources – Files/registries
  2. Access/Privilege issues
  3. Windows API calls with special cases for TS

The tool does the following:

  1. Enables the administrators to analyze test runs on the given binary

  2. Decides whether the binary will face any problems when deployed on TS. If yes, finds out the type of the problem and its severity.

  3. Presents this information in a readable format and summarizes the findings along with a recommendation.

  4. The findings can be exported and analyzed viewed at some other machine.

  5. The tool can be deployed on a set of user machines or test machine (running the client OS OR the  TS server OS) seamlessly. The findings can be gathered at the administrators machine. The administrator goes through the findings on all the machines and then makes a decision whether the application can be deployed on TS or not.

To Download visit the Connect site and follow the simple steps:

Step 1: Logon to the connect site and visit the connection directoryimage

Step 2: Apply for this connection and it will be added to yourimage

Step 3: Visit your dashboard and you find the connectionimage 

Step: 4 Once you are at the connection home page it'll allow you to download from the leftimage

You can also download the TS Application Analyzer Guide at the bottom of home pageimage