I needed to connect remotely via Remote Desktop to a Windows Server 2012 machine.

I received an rdp file that was configured to use an RD Gateway server:

However when trying to connect from my Windows 7 laptop (x64) machine, I got the following error message:

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In Enterprise environments users are often working on a remote (virtual) desktop such as when using SBC or VDI.

They typically get a full screen session, perhaps on a thin client, and have not idea that they are using a remote desktop.

The Problem
However when they press Ctrl-Alt-Delete they get either the local Security Attention Screen / Task Manager or nothing at all if it has been blocked.

Clever users know they can use alternative key combinations such as Shift-F2 for Citrix or Ctrl-Alt-End for RDS.

But that’s not the seamless experience we want to give our users, is it?

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Some time ago I wrote about the PNAgent data that is stored in the registry in XML format.

After that post Andrew Morgan asked me if I could extract the PNAgent icons from the XML data.

That got me interested so let’s look at this data!

If you look at XML from PNAgent the icondata as in the AppData.Details.Icon node you’ll see something like this:

Seems like the icon data is stored/encrypted in a proprietary format.

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ClickOnce is a Microsoft technology that enables an end user to install an application from the web without administrative permissions.

That’s great isn’t it?
While ClickOnce may sound great to developers it’s actually a nightmare for Enterprise administrators because they try to prevent users from installing software themselves.

ClickOnce also incorporates an Automatic Updates mechanism which means that users might run different or not tested/approved versions…

Virtual Environments
It get’s even worse in virtual environments such as VDI and SBC where machines are often non-persistent. Each time the users starts the application they will see a screen similar to the one below while they actually download and install it over and over again:

If the environment is persistent, it’s not guaranteed that the user works on the same machine each day. This means that the application will be installed on every box the user ever logs onto…

How does it work?
In order to understand how we can best treat ClickOnce applications we need to understand how they work since MSDN documentation does not describe this in detail.

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Since some time Microsoft no longer offers the Debugging Tools for Windows as a standalone download.

You need to download the SDK installer and download from there.

This sort of annoys me since I sometimes need to install WinDBG quickly for some troubleshooting.

I watched the URL’s with Fiddler while using the SDK Installer and here are the current URL’s:

From the SDK for Windows 7:
• Debugging Tools for Windows (x86) version 6.12.2.633 
• Debugging Tools for Windows (x64) version 6.12.2.633

I connected my Dell laptop to my TV via HDMI and the picture on the TV was in Gray scale instead of Color.

I had connected my laptop before and it worked fine so I knew that my TV and the HDMI cable were working correctly. I had recently updated the drivers for my NVIDIA graphics card so I went into the NVIDA Control Panel.

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Yesterday I was troubleshooting an application that was migrated to Citrix XenApp.

The application is able to use a high precision scale which is attached to the client pc’s com port. This com port is redirected to XenApp.

While testing users reported several issues, let’s have a look at them.

Error configuring COM Port
Within the application the comport to which the scale is connected must be configured:

After pressing "Registreer" to register the new com port the following error message was shown

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Today’s blog is about an application that was migrated to Citrix XenApp. During testing the users reported that several application menu’s were missing.

An example is the settings menu where the System tab is missing:

Fat Client:	XenApp:

I suspected a permissions issue so I added the account to the Local Administrator group to verify that. And indeed the System tab was visible.

Process Monitor
I removed the account from the Administrators group and fired up Process Monitor. I set a filter on the process name (ra60.exe) and on Result (ACCESS DENIED):

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Yesterday I was working with an Excel document that contained Combobox form controls.

I wanted to count the number of cells containing a particular value using the COUNTIF formula. However the count returned 0 because the LinkedCell property of the Combobox was not set to the Cell that contained the Combobox.

To set the LinkedCell Ctrl-Click the Combobox to select it, right-click and select Format Control. Then set the correct Cell in the Cell link field:

My sheet contained about 150 Comboboxes, so obviously I was going to do this using a script. I couldn’t find anything useful with Google so I wrote my own Macro.

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I was researching a database from an iOS app called <appname>.sqlite. From the filename it was obvious that we were dealing with an SQLite database.

I opened the database with SQLite Database Browser and the table I looked at has datetime values which are expressed in the TIMESTAMP data format in SQLite:

SQLite documentation indicates that the TIMESTAMP format is based on unix time: the number of seconds elapsed since 01-01-1970 in UTC time.

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