All about application delivery

again and again I hear that Med-V for Windows 7 is out.
NO, it is not!!!
MDOP for Windows 7 is out but Med-V is currently not supported on Windows 7. The Support will come with SP1 for Med-V 1.0 which should come in Q1 2010

(But my it runs on Windows 7 if you set in the MSI installation SKIP_OS_CHECK=1)

Today at a customer I wanted to show shims of the microsoft application compatibility toolkit (ACT5.5) with a redirectEXE shim. The redirectEXE shim kills the original exe and launches another executable (or better should). Here are some screenshots how to make your colleague mad by redirecting notepad.exe to regedit.exe

Create a new fix

Define a name for the fix and browse for the executable

Choose “none” because we want to define a special fix

Choose the redirectEXE shim and then press the Button parameters or ALT+P

Define the new executable (here regedit.exe, so if somebody wants to launch Notepad.exe regedit will be started)

Finish defining the shim – in the next steps you save the shim database and install it…

Save the database

Give the database a name

Define the path to the database

And finally install database. From now on you cannot launch notepad.exe anymore. Well at least this I thought but at my showcase it did not work. Why – I assume because my OS is Windows7. The exact same way works on Windows XP. So Probably the used ACT version 5.5 does not work with all shims on Windows7 yet.

Another point is for what you can use the redirectExe shim. A colleague of mine used it in former times for online patching of Terminal Servers. We had a customer with a very “update friendly” application. Every wednesday a new version came out and on thursday the emergency update. With the redirectEXE shim you could justr copy the new EXE on the server and redirect all new launches of the EXE to the new version. Doing this you dont need to kick the users….

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Some days ago a colleague showed me that redirectexe also works on Windows 7. And he figured out, that it is a problem with notepad – so it seems that redirectexe has a problem only with notepad   – thanks to Michael

we just had a road show and I demonstrated shims and we had the feeling, that shims are still very unknown in the market. Ever wondered why your old application (game) runs on a new operating system? It is mostly because Microsoft created a shim for it and included it into the operating system. What is a shim? A shim will redirect certain api calls of an application. With this technology you can for example redirect the saving of ini files from c:\windows to %appdata% or you can lie to an application and tell it that it is running on windows xp instead of windows 7. There are round about 6000 basic shims (a lot for games) that are also updated via windows update. You can build own shims with the application compatibility toolkit. More about shims soon here.