Day 1.... ThinApp...

What's new in the Application packaging world for me at the moment....Appv (Softgrid) and ThinApp (Thinstall)....here's where the blog is going to start..

ThinApp Ok so VMWare are good enough to let us try this for 60 days for free...my clock is now ticking
visit https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/?p=thinapp and sign up with a suitable account and get started.

First thing that struck me is the download is pretty small at only 7.7 MB for an MSI download. ThinApp is an agent-less technology which will only add an extra 400k to the final package which can be compiled into an MSI and distributed with your current system...SMS for example.

Setup of an environment for testing is one of the first things, if you havent got a virtual machine environment setup already then you need to get busy with this before you do anything with ThinApp...
There are a couple of options here, (3 actually) VMware Workstation (you get a download of a 60day trial with the ThinApp trial), Sun xVM VirtualBox or Microsoft's Virtual PC. My preference is for VirtualBox, http://www.virtualbox.org/ you get the snapshot feature of VM Workstation but for free :) (free is good) I have been using virtualbox for a few months now and it has been on the most part stable and easy to use, there have been the odd issue along the way but overall its a great free product.

Ok so the VM environment should consist of 2 machines:

Machine 1 (Admin machine called vm-xp1) - This should be a fully configured XP machine running the latest service pack and hotfixes. This machine will be used for post cleanup and modifications to be done. Create an admin account on this machine called Admin and two user accounts testuser1 and testuser2. I created a Share on the C:\ drive of the VM called "Share" and created the following directory structure
C:\Share\ThinApp
C:\Share\ThinDev
C:\Share\Software
Once complete take a snapshot of this incase you need to roll-back (hopefully you wont ever need to)

Machine 2 (scrap machine called vm-xp2) - This machine is another XP machine running the latest service packs and hotfixes but nothing else, create the Admin account and the test user accounts testuser1 and testuser2 keeping the passwords the same as machine 1. After the service pack installs be sure to reboot the machine so that the annoying firewall can be turned off, once complete shut the machine down and take a snapshot.

Remember to take those snapshots of the machines before you continue with anything else.

Copy the downloaded VMware-ThinApp-4.0.2-3089.msi into the C:\Share\Software directory on VM-Xp1 (version number may change)

First ThinApp capture....
Everybody uses winzip as one of thier first packages, so I decided to go with WinRar just to be a little different http://www.rarlab.com/ at time of writing my version was wrar39b3.exe.

log into vm-xp2 with the Admin account and connect to "\\vm-xp1\share" then install ThinApp you will need your evaluation license code here so make sure you have it handy, the install is very straight forward just a few screens to click next and then finish.

Capture the install

Launch the "ThinApp Setup Capture" from the start menu. The default install location for the application is C:\Program Files\VMware Thinapp\Setup Capture.exe" Click Next to the Welcome screen.
Click Next to begin the base snapshot of the machine.
Once the prescan stage is complete you can minimize the ThinApp utill.
Install Winrar.exe from \\vm-xp1\share\software selecting all the default location and options.
Launch Winrar when the install is complete to confirm that the software is working. Whenever you are capturing any software using any technique its always best to launch the application to not only confirm that the install is working but also to ensure that any first-launch registry keys are created.
Maximize ThinApp setup capture and click Next to begin the postscan.
The "select user-accessible entry points" window gives you the option to change the executables that will launch your virtual application, for this capture there is no need to change any of the entry points. You could change the Inventory name given to your virtual application, I have left this as WinRAR archiver. If you are happy with these settings click Next to continue.
Leave the Sandbox location as the users profile (%AppData%\Thinstall) for the moment, I am going to investigate using a remote location for this later in the blog (maybe tomorrow) and show how you can enable application/user roaming by using a network location. This page also gives you the options to add an Active Directory group that is allowed access to this package, as we are not currently in a domain I will be investigating this at a later date. Click Next to continue.
Leave the Default file system isolation mode as "Merged isolation mode" this will allow users to create .rar (or .zip) archive files on the local host in the user directories such as desktop or My Documents etc. Click Next.
The project location should be changed \\Vm-xp1\Share\ThinDev\WinRAR\39b3 so that the project files are stored on the Admin machine ready for reverting the basebuild and testing. Click Next
Click Build Now to build the package (we will build this again at a later date to change some of the options) Finally click finish

Shut down vm-XP2 and revert the image to the basebuild and start the machine again.

On VM-XP1 navigate to the C:\Share\ThinDev\WinRAR\39b3\bin folder and you will find the complete Virtual application (we havent compiled the application into an MSI at this stage so you will just find three exe's which match the three shortcuts that are created by WinRAR when it is installed) Copy these files across to C:\Share\ThinApp\WinRAR where they will be accessed by the TestUser1 on the test machine.

Log into machine vm-XP2 as testuser1 and map a drive to \\vm-xp1\Share\ThinApp\WinRAR and launch the applications.

Congratulations you have just created your first ThinApp application.

Now one thing that could be done with these exe files is that they could be distributed to local workstations into the C:\Program Files\WinRAR directory and shortcuts could be setup in the AllUsers start menu to launch these applications, remember that these are virtual ThinApps so they will have no impact on the desktops registry or file system other than the size of the files and shortcuts, not forgetting the sandbox location which will hold the tempoary files (more on these later) the default location is C:\Documents and Settings\testuser1\Application Data\Thinstall\WinRAR archiver.

There is a very obvious issue with this install and the virtual application which is there are no shell context menu options for adding files to an archive (right click add-to-archive for example) this needs investigating and a workaround will need developing if there is one.

The next stage of the ThinApp process will be to build the package into an MSI which can be used for distribution via SMS then there is setting the applications to have zero filesystem overhead by making them roaming........