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Project NorthStar Beta 2; Application Link (AppLink)
May 5, 2008
Last months there are lot of communities where people discuss the possibilities of ‘Dynamic Linking’, ‘Context Suiting’ or ‘Bubble-to-Bubble Communication’ and in Microsoft terms ‘Apllication Linking’. What are the do’s and dont’s? What is working and what is not?
I did a lot of testing with Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 (before SoftGrid) and figured out that linkíng virtual applications works very well for Microsoft Office plugins but when you want to use it for middleware applications such as Oracle, DotNet Framework or Java it is not so terrific. In the mean time VMware-Thinstall (Project NorthStar) is also building a powerfull solution to create an ‘Application Link’ between two virtual applications. I did some research and tried to package a Thinstalled application which is build on DotNet Framework 2.0.
First I made a capture of the DotNet FrameWork and created a Thinstalled executable file of it. After that I made a capture of the application which depends on DotNet Framework and created another Thinstalled executable file. Finally I modified the “Package.ini” file within the ‘Project Files’ and set the ‘Application Link’ between the two Thinstalled executables so that the Thinstalled application uses the Thinstalled DotNet Framework. The result is great!!
You can enable ‘Application Link’ by editing the ‘Package.ini’ file with the following content:
OptionalAppLinks=plugins\*.exe
I think that this is the first ‘Application Link’ solution that can really link middleware to a virtual application…
Click here to see VMware’s Application Link Demo!
Topics: VMware | 1 Comment »
May 8th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Perfect news., guy