So today is my last day at Citrix.  Over the past month or so I’ve been interviewing with Apple’s iPhone team and have accepted a position on the Wireless Technologies team.  My official title is “Tools/Automation QA Engineer”, which basically means I’ll be writing software to test the iPhone’s Bluetooth and Wifi features.  I’m pretty excited about the opportunity, after all I get to work on the world’s best phone and live in one of the greatest cities.  But there’s a lot that needs to happen in these next couple of weeks.

My first day on the job is July 27, a little less than two weeks away.  In about a week the movers will ship all of my stuff out west and I’ll be jumping on a plane shortly after.  I’ll be staying in temporary housing till I can find a place in San Francisco, hopefully this wont take long.  I really can’t imagine what this experience would be like without the help of the relocation staff.

So between getting ready for the move and enjoying my last few days in the warm Atlantic Ocean, I plan on spending some time on NetPoint.  It’s a bit aggressive, but I’m going to try get the NetPoint v2.5.1 update online and give the Neutex web site a facelift.  The v2.5.1 update will have some bug fixes and basic integration with OneOrZero’s help desk system.  As far as the web site goes, I think there are a few things that can be done to help market NetPoint better.  I anticipate the first month or two at Apple will be crazy, so finishing this before I head out to the valley will definitely save me some grey hair.

As far as Shannon Ma Virtualized goes, you probably wont see much new content on XenApp.  However, I still plan on developing tools like NetPoint that will alleviate some of the common problems IT Pros face and you can be the first to hear about them here.  I also have some other ideas for topics that I need to look into a bit more, so we’ll see how that pans out.

Back in March I wrote a blog about the NetPoint PowerShell Commands, which are now available in NetPoint 2.5. These commands can be used to query your network inventory from PowerShell, so you can easily automate those repetitive system and asset management tasks.

Within the upcoming week or two, I plan on posting a set of videos that will show how these cmdlets can be used to automate some typical IT scenarios.  This first episode gives a brief introduction of the NetPoint PowerShell Commands.  We also walk-through a scenario that involves getting a list of the programs installed on an arbitrary machine in just one line of script.

In the next episode, we’ll look at generating custom network inventory reports right from PowerShell, so stay tuned!

I’ve been thinking about adding some new enhancements to the XenApp Publishing Extension, but before doing so I’m curious to see how useful the community thinks they are.  To answer this question, I’ve decided to post a blog where you can give feedback on each enhancement.  If these ideas get a lot of votes, you’ll probably see them come to life.

So here we go.  The first idea is to add offline app support to the XenApp Publishing Extension.  This means you would be able to right-click a .profile in Windows and publish one of its apps to your farm.

The next idea is to add PowerShell support to the XenApp Publishing Extension.  Right now the extension publishes online apps via MFCOM.  A set of PowerShell cmdlets known as the XenApp Commands have been released as a Technology Preview and can also be used to publish both online and offline apps.  Since the code for the XenApp Publishing Extension is available, adding support for this would also be a good reference for anyone that’s interested in calling the cmdlets from a .NET app.

Thanks in advance for your votes!

A fellow Shannon Ma Virtualized fan has posted a link that talks about how you can clone a XenApp server with remapped drives.  Check out http://kb.acronis.com/content/1666 if you’re interested in this.  The article talks about a few ways you can accomplish this with and without Acronis’ imaging solution.  To be honest, I haven’t had a chance to try this out but it seems like a handy reference if you’re looking to XenAppPrep your servers with remapped drives.  Thanks Mike!

About a month ago I decided to join the microblogging world by creating a page on Twitter. I’m impressed how easy Twitter made updating your status, especially with text messages and their Facebook integration.  If you’re a fan of Shannon Ma Virtualized, feel free to follow me at http://twitter.com/shannonma.  Most of my posts will be targeted towards my work on XenApp and NetPoint, but you may find an occassional post on other cool yet unrelated technology topics (such as this one).

My latest side project at Citrix is the XenApp Publishing Extension, a tool that makes app publishing so simple your mom could probably do it.  It integrates with Windows, so you can right-click on any executable or shortcut to publish it.  The final bits, including the source code, are now available on CDN and can be downloaded from here.

I’ve included a video of the tool in action, which by the way was taken with GoView.  For those if you not familiar with GoView, it’s our all new service that allows you to create your own screen recordings and publish them online.  Think of Camtasia, except web-based and best of all totally free.  It’s pretty slick and I highly recommend trying it out if you ever need to make your own screen recordings.

Anyway, back to the XenApp Publishing Extension.  If you’re interested in taking a peek at the code, you’ll notice its 100% WPF based to create that “cool” look and feel.  It also uses MFCOM and the infamous DataModel-View-ViewModel pattern.  This makes pretty easy to maintain and test.

I’d also like to thank the following Citrites for their contributions:

• Chris Anthony and the User Experience team for the icon art.
• Thomas Hammond for the WPF wizard control.
• Vishnu Nath who came to me with the right-click app publishing idea.

Well, that’s all I have for today.  As always, I enjoy hearing feedback from anyone using my tools, especially if its saved you some gray hairs.  So feel free to post any questions or comments you have here.  Till next time!

I just released a update of the PowerShell SnapIn for XenServer Snapshots, which can be found here. This version contains a NoStart switch on the Restore-VM cmdlet. By default Restore-VM will start the virtual machine after its been reverted. You can now specify the NoStart switch if you don’t want it to be started. Here’s a brief example:

Restore-VM -Hostname 192.168.0.2 -Username root -Password qwerty -VM Bluemoon -Snapshot BluemoonBackup -NoStart

I’m always interested in hearing feedback, so feel free to post any questions or comments you have.

P.S. If you’re a XenApp customer, Citrix Receiver for the iPhone (aka the XenApp client for the iPhone) is now available in the AppStore. Chris Fleck has posted a demo if it here. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to try this out as I don’t (yet) have one of these snazzy phones.

This past week I spent a few evenings on my balcony coding the final bits of Project Full Moon.  Full Moon is a set of PowerShell Cmdlets for NetPoint, which are targeted at helping IT Pros automate repetitive system and asset management tasks.

In this post I’ll show how you can use these commands to make your life a bit easier.  Here are some scenarios I’ll walk through:

• You’re interested in getting a list of the apps installed on a certain system
• Some of your Dell workstations are having issues with their NVIDIA graphics cards.  You need to apply a driver update to all of these systems.
• It’s that time of the year to buy new hardware.  You need to determine if there are any systems that need a hard drive upgrade.
• There’s a new virus in the wild.  You need to ensure all of your systems are protected with up to date virus definitions.

So let’s get started!  First let’s add the NetPoint PowerShell SnapIn and get a list of our network inventory cmdlets:

Add-PSSnapin Neutex*
Get-Command -PSSnapin Neutex*

PowerShell will list the 20 cmdlets available to us:

• Get-NetAntiVirus
• Get-NetBIOS
• Get-NetCDROMDrive
• Get-NetDiskDrive
• Get-NetFirewall
  
• Get-NetFloppyDrive
• Get-NetLogicalDisk
• Get-NetMemory
• Get-NetModem
• Get-NetMonitor
• Get-NetNetworkAdapter
• Get-NetOperatingSystem
• Get-NetPatch
• Get-NetPrinter
• Get-NetProcessor
• Get-NetProgram
• Get-NetService
• Get-NetSoundDevice
• Get-NetSystem
• Get-NetVideoController

Now we're ready to tackle our scenarios.

You're interested in getting a list of the apps installed on a certain system

Get-NetProgram can be used to retrieve a set of programs.  Running this command by itself will return all programs that have been installed on our network (even those that have been uninstalled).  Like all of our other network inventory commands, it also accepts a set of parameters (app name, publisher, how often it's used, etc.) that can be used to filter its results.  Here is the script that will get us the results we want:

Get-NetProgram -System maui -Uninstalled $False | % { $_.DisplayName } | sort -unique

This command starts out by retrieving all of the apps installed on the system named maui.  By default, we’ll get a whole set of information about each app, but we only want the app names so we’ll pipe this into % { $_.DisplayName } and sort it so we can easily get an idea of the installed apps.

Some of your Dell workstations are having issues with their NVIDIA graphics cards.  You need to apply a driver update to all of these systems.

The data we need to target for this scenario is spread across two domains: video controller (NVIDIA graphics cards) and system (Dell workstations).  We’ll use Get-VideoController in conjunction with Get-System to get the job done:

Get-NetVideoController -Name nvidia* -Uninstalled $False | Get-NetSystem -Manufacturer dell* | % { $_.ComputerSystemName } | sort -unique

Here we’re getting a list of all installed graphics cards whose name starts with NVIDIA.  We then pipe this to Get-System with the Manufacturer parameter set.  This will return all Dell systems that contain an NVIDIA graphics cards.  The last two portions of this script will cause only the system names to be returned in alphabetical order.

You could use this output with the WMI cmdlets to install the driver update.

It’s that time of the year to buy new hardware.  You need to determine if there are any systems that need a hard drive upgrade.

In this scenario, we’re interested in using the Get-NetLogicalDisk cmdlet as follows:

Get-NetLogicalDisk -DriveType "Local Disk" | where { $_.FreeSpace / $_.Size -lt .10 } | % { $_.ComputerSystemName }

The first portion of this script will get all partitions that are stored on hard disks (versus CDs, floppies, etc.).  We proceed by using PowerShell’s where command to only get partitions that have less than 10% of free space and we pipe this to % { $_.ComputerSystemName } to only get a list of the system names.

There’s a new virus in the wild.  You need to ensure all of your systems are protected with up to date virus definitions.

This scenario is a little more complex than the previous ones, however we can still solve it in two lines of PowerShell.

$i = Get-NetAntiVirus -Uninstalled $False -UptoDate $True | % { $_.ComputerSystemName } | sort -unique
Get-NetSystem | where {$i -notcontains $_.ComputerSystemName} | % { $_.ComputerSystemName } | sort -unique

The first line will get us names of all the systems that have an antivirus client with up to date virus definitions.  The second line will subtract this list from all of the systems on our network using the where command, which leaves us with the unprotected systems.  The WMI cmdlets could also be used here to install an updated antivirus client on these systems.

That pretty much sums up some of the basic scenarios you can address with NetPoint’s PowerShell Cmdlets.  There is some documentation work that still needs to be sorted out, however you can expect to see the final bits online in a couple of weeks.  In the meantime if you don’t already have a copy of NetPoint, you can get the free Express Edition here.

I began working on my latest side project a week or so ago.  This one involves the XenApp Management SDK (aka MFCOM) with C# and WPF.  One of my goals for the project is to maintain compatibility with XenApp 4.5 and 5.0.  So I setup XenApp 4.5 on my XenServer and installed the latest and greatest version of the SDK (5.0) on my Vista development box.

I’ve used the SDK in the past, but its been a while so I was a little rusty.  I ran mfreg to point the SDK to my server.  Then without much thought I wrote some C# code to connect up to my 4.5 farm:

IMetaFrameFarm8 _farm = new MetaFrameFarm();
_farm.Initialize(MetaFrameObjectType.MetaFrameWinFarmObject);

I hit F5 to run my project in Visual Studio and got a little suprise in the form of an InvalidCastException:

Unable to cast COM object of type 'MetaFrameCOM.MetaFrameFarmClass' to interface type 'MetaFrameCOM.IMetaFrameFarm8'. This operation failed because the QueryInterface call on the COM component for the interface with IID '{ED62F657-63C2-11D4-94D8-00C04FB0F326}' failed due to the following error: Unable to cast COM object of type 'MetaFrameCOM.MetaFrameFarmClass' to interface type 'MetaFrameCOM.IMetaFrameFarm8'. This operation failed because the QueryInterface call on the COM component for the interface with IID '{ED62F657-63C2-11D4-94D8-00C04FB0F326}' failed due to the following error: No such interface supported (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004002 (E_NOINTERFACE)).

Version 8 of IMetaFrameFarm is the latest version of the farm interface for XenApp 5.0.  I needed to use an older version of the interface, one that 4.5 shipped with.  So I changed IMetaFrameFarm8 to IMetaFrameFarm7 and everything worked fine.  Older interfaces are compatible with future versions of XenApp, which means I’m guaranteed my code will work with XenApp 5.0.

That brings us to lesson #1: Each release of XenApp is updated with a new set of interfaces.  The interface you use must be <= to the version of XenApp you’re targeting. For example, IMetaFrameFarm7 shipped with XenApp 4.5 and can be used against XenApp 4.5 and 5.0.

Next I wrote some code to iterate through the applications in my farm and ran into the following UnauthorizedAccessException:

Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))

This was due to my Vista machine’s DCOM Default Impersonation Level not being set to Impersonate. It seems Identify is the default in Vista. I changed this by doing the following:

1. Open the Component Services MMC snap-in.
2. Right click on the My Computer node.
3. Select Properties.
4. Go to the Default Properties tab.
5. Under Default Impersonation Level choose Impersonate.

That brings us to lesson #2: DCOM must be configured properly on the system running the SDK.  More information on this can be found in the documentation under Configuring MFCOM Security, which gets installed as part of the SDK.

After addressing these issues the SDK worked great and I was on my way churn out the bits of my project.

XenAppPrep was recently awarded third place at Rocket Science. Here’s a picture of the award taken from my Motorola Q:

The event is held annually by the Citrix Application Virtualization Group (aka makers of XenApp amongst other products) where engineers can show off their latest side projects to the company. It’s like a science fair for Citrites.

I attended Rocket Science 2008 back in October and had the opportunity to demo XenAppPrep to our engineers, management team, and executives. The event was a blast, there were a lot of interesting inventions and conversations going on. I will be looking forward to Rocket Science 2009!