Using Scripts with SoftGrid

Ron Crumbaker at myITforum.com, Inc. — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 21:43:03 GMT

http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2007/04/18/using-scripts-with-softgrid.aspx The following was

re: Using Scripts with SoftGrid

fgrosswig — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 10:31:45 GMT

"...All scripts must be placed between the <DEPENDENCY> tags within the OSD files..."

I do not agree with that since we use Citrx Terminal Server Environment. Let me explain a situation why we place an self written wsh script into the CODEBASE TAG to launch an application and not like the usual way into the DEPENDENCY TAG.

<CODEBASE...

FILENAME="%WINDIR%\System32\wscript.exe"

PARAMETERS="prelaunch.vbs"

SYSGUARDFILE.../>

If you want to stream an application which its size is about 250 MB or bigger than that and you have registry / ocx / dll files you'll need run before the application is launched. And you'll need to map different network drives for each client but for the same application. This normally happens if you have one application you use for several clients but with different environments. Then you need to execute the script before you stream the entire application and prepare the virtual registry for your client and your network mapping etc... If the script execute fails then your script gets noticed about this error and stops streaming the entire application. This saves you network traffic and you see errors before the application gets started. You can modify clients error messages instead having SoftGrid errors which may not SoftGrid errors at all if an ocx or dll file is missing or an registry setting isn’t performed or an network drive is wrong mapped which this application needs to get started. The advantage why we don’t place the script in the DEPENDENCY TAG is as follow.

The OSD File is streamed by sfttray and you do not have any control of the osd afterwards. The application tries to launch after unsuccessful streaming because the osd file does not interrupt on any error. So you cant shut down a application before getting noticed about any wrong settings or errors. Since we discovered that SoftGrid proceeds with the osd launch phase, no matter if you try to set the TAG to WAIT="TRUE". So we had to place the script above all the other TAGS and we developed a script which starts the application. All information we need to run the application we placed out in a ini file which will parsed from the vbs file. So we can run multiple programs, perform multiple registry settings or registering ocx/dll files. But this is only necessary if you have a Terminal Environment which is really limited to clients. Like administrator shuts off the administrative rights for normal users.

The other problem is if you set the PARAMTER TIMEOUT the script you try to perform does not complete all settings before the timeout is reached. The Client tries to launch the application after the timeout is over and this time varies to each client. This was our secondary problem that all clients we tried to perform registry settings, dll/ocx registrations where too slow before the client launched the application. The timeout settings would be too high and not countable to set in the osd file. So we come to the conclusion to place the script above the DEPENDENCY TAG to make all settings trough the script and after that we launch the application. So we make sure we do not have unnecessary timeouts and we guarantee the application launches in the quite correct manner.

I hope this comment is helpful to anyone who tries to script with SoftGrid.

Good luck and comments are welcome.

Sincerely yours,

Falk G.

SoftGrid team at Microsoft adds blog entry describing how to use scripts within an .OSD file for specific launch conditions

shawnbass.com - Virtualization blog — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 19:40:20 GMT

The MS SoftGrid team has added a blog entry describing how to use scripts within .OSD files to modify the behavior of the application launch. They've also provided some basic examples of how one ...

Using Scripts with SoftGrid

The World Simplified is a Virtual World — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 11:40:09 GMT

The chaps out in Boston are doing some great work at the moment and have even started getting there blog