Monthly Archives: September 2012

ThinKiosk 3.0 General Release

It gives me great pleasure and relief to announce the general availability of ThinKiosk 3.0!

ThinKiosk 3.0 is another ground up redevelopment of the tool, 2 months ago I broke the program beyond recognition to add support for shared libraries and reduce the number of active components in the program. It’s fast, lightweight, it’s been a long time coming and I am absolutely thrilled with the result!

WIth that out of the way and without further ado, there are hundred’s of changes to ThinKiosk, below are just the highlights:

Additional support:

Added support for Citrix StoreFront services 1.2 (Cloud Gateway).
Added support for VDI in a Box 5.1 (no open prompt!)
Added support for internet Explorer 10 as the local browser.
Added support for Windows 8 as an end point.
Added support for Windows Embedded Standard 8 as an end point.

New Features:

EULA:

This isn’t exactly a new feature, but I want to be as forthcoming about this as possible. I’ve added an EULA to ThinKiosk. There is nothing untoward, there’s no lock in, it just says its free to use, you can’t resell it, and you can’t sue me if you do something stupid.

Ultimately, it just protects me (a free tool developer) from lawsuits.

Languages:

The Norwegian language has now been added, thanks Thomas!

All current languages have been updated (spanish, french, dutch, italian, German)

Startup marquee:

On particularly old or slow pc’s the startup time for ThinKiosk can be quite lengthy while ThinKiosk loads the embedded browser.

To address this delay, a splash screen with progress marquee has been added to provide feedback and keep the user entertained.

Screenshot and email functionality:

You can now allow ThinKiosk register the [PrintScreen] key, which in turn will allow the user to use this key to send an error or issue directly to the helpdesk, including support information via SMTP.

By default, email and screenshot functionality is disabled, until you add SMTP options via policy or offline config too.

Thanks Shane for the idea!

Progress bar:

When loading slow to load URL’s, it can be difficult to tell whether the website has hung, or it has just taken some time to load. By default ThinKiosk 3.0 will ship with an “on demand” progress bar to tell you when ThinKiosk is busy.

Wireless Networks:

Beta support for Wireless Networks has been added via the control panel

This functionality will only currently work with:

Windows 7
Windows Embedded Standard 7.
Windows Thin PC

Note: this setting is disabled by default, but can be enabled via the group policy or offline config too.

Language Selection:

Probably the most requested feature so far, I’ve finally added a drop down for Language selection as below:

This drop down will allow the users to change the language on the fly. This option can be disabled via group policy or the offline config tool.

New items in the admin menu

The admin menu now contains some very useful commands for administrators when troubleshooting end points:

Task Manager.
Internet Explorer Control panel.
Restart /Exit ThinKiosk.
Remote Desktop connection.
Offline Configuration Tool.

Desktop launching dialog:

When using Web interface log off on session launch, ThinKiosk performed the task so quickly that the user was often left a little confused as to what has happened and why they have been kicked out before the session finally launched. ThinKiosk will now provide feedback when a new session launches or when workspace control is busy reconnecting and has a 2 seconds hold down timer before it kicks the user off the web interface.

End of session options:

Previously when a remote session ended, you had an option to log the local user off. This was particularly useful if you were using Citrix Pass through authentication. A recurring request was to add the ability to restart, or shutdown the pc. This is now included in the offline config tool and group policy.

Classic Colours:

A number of fussy individual’s didn’t appreciate my lightsteelblue colour scheme change, for you guys (you know who you are) you can now disable the colour change on startup via group policy or offline config tool if grey is your thing.

Process Launcher:

A new feature in ThinKiosk 3.0 is the process launcher. Instead of loading ThinKiosk as a browser session, the process launcher simply launches the process you specify, and only displays the ThinKiosk menu bar at the top for user convenience.

This process launcher, will launch the process you configure, watch the process and relaunch it if the user accidentally closes the window!

Process launcher also has all the user empowering options available, along with power management. This functionality is all free as aposed to paid for solutions delivering half this functionality!
As below, you can use the Process launcher for Microsoft Remote desktop connections:

Or VMware view!:

Or basically any process you would like to use. This functionality is quite new, so if find issues with it, I want to know about it!

Offline Config Tool improvements:

Restructure:

The offline config tool has been reordered to provide a better structure to settings.

Policy awareness:

The offline config tool will now detect values specified in group policy or in user key’s it cannot control and warn you that these values exist.

The apply button has been removed from the offline config tool, it wasn’t needed or working exactly as I wanted it to.

Bug fixes / enhancements:

ThinKiosk Layout changes:

Resizing ThinKiosk has been moved to a more native location as below:

The clock and language selection are now enabled by default:

Advanced functionality:

ThinKiosk can no longer be run as a standalone executable, the shared.dll must be available too, Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Changing zones in internet explorer while ThinKiosk is running used to result in a crash (e.g moving a domain from the internet zone to trusted sites). This crash is now handled and you will receive a warning icon to restart ThinKiosk at your next convenience. Please note, circumventing this crash will disable Auto log off and log off redirection until ThinKiosk is restarted.

When navigating to a url with an untrusted SSL certificate, by default an embedded browser will not allow you to continue without prompting for scripting errors. These scripting errors in turn stopped Citrix Web Interface from working in multi farm environments. Support has been added to allow scripting errors only when an untrusted ssl cert is requested.

ThinKiosk will now amend the feature controls neccessary for embedded browsers on a per user basis. This will allow for better native support for ActiveX and Mime types. This will cause a quick restart as soon as ThinKiosk launches if a change is neccessary. This will also handle the upgrade to Internet Explorer 10 seamlessly. This process can be disabled via the offline config tool / group policy.

All shared code between ThinKiosk and the Offline config tool has been moved to a shared library! it wasn’t fun, it wasn’t easy but it will make things alot easier for me in future when making changes.

And it’s still free!

ThinKiosk development has taken quite some time and it takes time to support you via email. If you use ThinKiosk in your environment or appreciate the savings its made for you, please consider making a donation to help me keep this project alive… I would really appreciate it as it will allow me to invest in better development tools to make the product look and feel even better!

Download:

The download links for ThinKiosk are available above, or here:

ThinKiosk 3 features preview

Silently installing the Citrix Edgesight ActiveX plugin

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Just a really quick blog post on how to silently install the reporting agent inside your environment.

Log into a server / client without the EdgeSight plugin installed, and browse to the edgesight website. Once logged in, you will receive the usual prompt to install the software:

Install the software and ensure it works, then fire up a command prompt and browse down to “c:windowsdownloaded program files”. Once in this folder, a DIR will reveal the ActiveX plugin “csmdbprov.dll”.

Now simply copy this file out to shared storage:

Once done, now its scripting time!

Below are two examples in batch (.bat , .cmd) or PowerShell (.ps1) for achieving this:

(please amend h:csmdbprov.dll to the path you use)

Batch:

[sourcecode language=”text”]
copy h:csmdbprov.dll "c:windowsdownloaded program files"
regsvr32 /s "c:windowsdownloaded program files"
[/sourcecode]

Powershell:

[sourcecode language=”powershell”]
if (test-path h:csmdbprov.dll){
copy-item H:csmdbprov.dll ‘C:WindowsDownloaded Program Files’ -Force
start-process regsvr32 -ArgumentList "/s ""C:WindowsDownloaded Program Filescsmdbprov.dll""" -wait
}
[/sourcecode]

Windows 8, a first look at VDI thanks to Citrix VDI in a Box… TLDR: It’s not good.

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A quick note, I’m aware it’s no longer called Metro, but its just easier that I’ve kept it named that way for this blog post.

Recently Citrix VDI in a Box announced in quite an un-triumphant fashion, that support for Windows 8 has been added to this technology stack. I was excited to hear this and was very eager to get to the lab and start building an environment.

VDI in a Box 5.1.

With VDI in a box, setting up windows 8 was a snap, a quick install of the release candidate on Hyper-V took a few minutes and no integration tools installation was neccessary as they are included in the operating system with Windows 8 natively, winner!

VDI in a box instantly detected the new VM and with a few clicks later we had ourselves a working Windows 8 VDI environment. I was very disappointed to see that Citrix have only provided support for windows 8 with RDP / remote desktop functionality for now… Yes that’s right, no HDX just yet… So I couldn’t test from a touch device.

Without further ado, lets leave Citrix here in triumph and lets get into the Microsoft issues I found with a few hours of testing under my belt:

Log in screen issues:

The secure login screen password input is not yet working, so you’ll need to input your credentials twice on login:

Disconnecting and reconnecting will result in a very confusing user selection screen:

When you click the account that is signed in, you only seem to have a smart card option:

So I’m locked out? Wonderful.

Log off / Disconnect woe’s:

Oddly enough, Microsoft have reintroduced a confusing method to handle log off and disconnect in Windows 8, this “issue” used to also be present in windows 2000 / 2003 where the log off option was under log off on the start menu, but the Disconnect button was under Shutdown button the start menu.

Log off in Windows 8, is on the start menu as below:

The disconnect menu however, has been moved to the shutdown button available also via the charms bar from windows explorer or the start menu charms:

Why this has been introduced again, I do not know.

Metro, behavior remotely:

(Metro News Icon, how that looks like news? I’ll never know.)

Metro performs extremely poorly over a lan from a Windows 7 device, When navigating through metro the animations (flip, draw, etc) feel extremely sticky, they render in blocks and often tear despite being on a local area network.

From a Windows 8 device, a lot of these annoyances are removed, as the new RDP 8 protocol seems to disable the flipping and drawing, resulting in Metro just presenting as blocks of color without the animations. Although this “feels” better from a user experience, it does remove a lot of the charm from metro applications… Whether they had any to begin with is up to you.

As a side note:

I took the binaries, MUI and relevant dll’s from a windows 8 build, reverse engineered them into windows 7 and tested them. The user experience from 7 then mirrored 8, So I’d expect an RDP update to version 8 to arrive to previous versions of Windows shortly. I’ll blog how to do this later.

Desktop in a window? forget about it.

Trying to run Windows 8 in a window, as opposed to a fullscreen vdi desktop is extremely tricky.

By default VDI in a Box and / or Remote desktop will not pass through local key strokes like the start button ([windows] + [C] for charms, [windows] for start menu) to the remote desktop, so navigating around windows 8 is extremely difficult.

when trying to access the start menu, or charms bar in windowed mode, you will often find your mouse falling out of the remote desktop and activating the hot spots if you are connecting from Windows 8. It’s really a case of “hover up there and hope” that you will receive the right menu.

(Charms can and will overflow)

(same for the start menu)

(Previews too)

When Citrix add HDX support, I personally feel they’ll have a hard time getting the desktop viewer to work correctly with this “run to the corner of the screen and hope” problem. The introduction of passthrough key strokes will help immensely.

The solution may be to “lock the mouse in” similar to hypervisors consoles when you have not yet installed the optimisation tools. Time will tell.

General interface complaints.

Not specific to VDI, but ultimately a VDI issue if you present this to a user, here were my grumblings:

Metro:

It’s utterly useless for a task worker. I’d like to get my job done, not be assaulted by the color scale. This will work fine on a users personal device but it has no place on the enterprise desktop.

Multi tasking in Metro, in it’s rawest form, swapping from application to application, is painful and unneccesary.

The first thing most enterprises will do is remove most of the out of box, and mostly celebrated metro functionality, like store, news, social media, bing, maps, etc leaving just a few useful tiles:

Dual screen woe’s:

The windows start menu will intermittently display on whatever screen it feels like. At first my start menu was appearing on the right hand screen:

Then it hops over as and when it feels like it:

As you have two desktop taskbar’s, this causes a bit of cofusion as to which one is primary, etc. To top it all off, if you launch a pinned item from one screen, there’s no guarantee it will open on that screen!

Double interfaces:

Throughout this entire process, the largest annoyance I suffered was this split desktop scenario. I spent alot of my time trying to figure out whether I should be in Metro, or the classic desktop and having to swap from one to the other was a decrease in productivity.

Metro from a keyboard and mouse:

With a Windows keyboard and mouse I made the following findings:

I was heavily reliant on key strokes to avoid having to use the corner hot spots, I’m an active keyboard user so it was no big issue for me, but I know this will annoy the clickers out there.
Scrolling metro applications using a wheel mouse felt alien, Rolling up and down to go left and right confused me, but I soon got used to it.
Using the keyboard arrows in metro applications was very jumpy and clunky.

From a MacBook Air’s touchpad:

The multi touch from apple’s touch pad fits right in with the metro interface, allowing you to scroll up, down, left and right to your hearts content, just remember to use the flipflop mouse settings to replicate the mac’s style of opposite direction scrolling.

Wrap up?

I read an interesting article this weekend on the business insider about the look and feel of the new devices for windows 8. What is glaringly obvious from both my testing and the model of devices coming from vendors, is that nobody really has any idea what to do with this frankenstein operating system.

Citrix have done an excellent job brokering this operating system, it was as simple as a few clicks and the desktops were ready, the problem is the operating system itself.

Will Windows 8 be a success in the enterprise VDI market?

No, probably not, But before I comdemn it completely, there are a few caveats.

From a desktop or laptop that is not touch enabled? this desktop will not appeal to the end users in an enterprise, moreover it will just frustrate years from their life.

From a touch device, (be it a Microsoft enabled device or Apple) you may have a better chance. Assuming Citrix work their magic to allow the receiver on touch enabled devices to pass through gestures, I think this desktop could work, but the target audience in an enterprise will be so small that it’s not going to win the hearts and minds of all employees.

My honest opinion, even with VDI aside, is that this desktop is going to (and should) be skipped by enterprises.

Why?

This desktop just isn’t for the majority. It’s clear Microsoft are targetting apple’s share of the consumer market and enterprises have been pushed aside in favour of blocky bells and colourful whistles.

What are we to do about VDI?

Hands up who rolled out a windows 7 VDI or windows server 2008 R2 SBC project? Good news for you ladies and gents, you’ve seen a further return in your investment of roughly 3-4 years on your current implementation.

If you are looking to do a VDI project? don’t wait for this desktop, I wouldnt even consider it, I’d just proceed with Windows 7.

If in the unlikely case you need one or two metro applications, I’d wait for XenApp to be available for Server 2012 and Publish these one or two applications to your windows 7 desktops, I can’t imagine this not being supported and it will be much easier than forcing the metro interface on all users.

Don’t agree?

My opionion is just mine, and I’d love to hear some of your findings. Drop me a comment below, catch me on twitter (@andyjmorgan) or email me on Andrew@andrewmorgan.ie.

I’ll follow this post up with a “great new features for VDI” blog post aswell, to show there is some really cool technology in here, sadly they are just completely overwhelmed by Metro.