About the Tools
TMurgent makes some of our favorite tools that were developed here in-house available
to our closest friends. Since you are here, you make the "A-List"!
These tools are generally free for you to download and use. See specific Copyright
information on each, as some have restrictions for certain classes of folks. You
will see things like "free for use by consultants and enterprises, but ISVs must
purchase a license".
App-V/SoftGrid Related
- LIVE: OSD Illustrated Updated 3/2010!
- This is a live, interactive tool to help you with syntax and meaning of the SoftGrid/App-V OSD file. Place your mouse over OSD elements to reveal tag meaning and use.
Updated to include all known (documented and undocumented) OSD elements and parameters for App-V 4.6.
- PkgView (view App-V pkg files) New!
- View App-V "pkg" file content, both file and registry.
See PkgView Tool page
.
- XenApp Publishing Extensions 2.0 (for App-V virtual applications) New!
- Free tools to more easily publish App-V virtual applications to a XenApp farm.
Once you have deployed App-V virtual applications to your XenApp 4.5 and 5.0 Farms, you will want to publish the shortcuts to users.
This is a slow and tedious process when using the XenApp Management Console, requiring you to reference sfttray, the OSD name, and then locate the correct icon.
These tools are designed to help make this publishing task a little easier.
These tools work with any style of App-V distribution, including the full App-V Management Server, SCCM, and "Stand Alone Client".
The XenApp Publishing Extensions 2.0 contains two tools.
- The first tool in the package allows you to right click on any application shortcut, including those of App-V virtual applications to publish to XenApp.
The wizard prompts you to select the servers from the list of servers in the farm, and Active Directory Users/Groups to publish to.
- The second tool in the package allows selection of multiple App-V apps by selecting those found in the App-V cache for publishing to XenApp.
The wizard interrogates the App-V client for the application list to choose from, prompts you to select the servers from the list of servers in the farm, and Active Directory Users/Groups to publish to.
- Because portions of this software is an update to an existing Citrix tool, I have worked things out with Citrix to distribute the tool through the Citrix Developer Network (CDN) "Code Share".
You can find the tools through this link here.
At the CDN page you will find a link for the binary msi distribution or source code.
- AppV DeployApp and PublishApp Updated!
- Free tools to deploy App-V Virtual Applications without a back-end server.
Better than MSI Deployment because you get Per-User Publishing and Active Updates.
The ideal "simplest" way to deploy virtual applications -- especially to Terminal Servers!
- Main page for information on these tools New!
- Read the Whitepaper PDF Whitepaper about these tools.
- Watch the 9-minute Video showing the tools in action.
- Download Version 1.6 of the Free Tools, with msi Right Click to Save file. Updated May 2, 2010
- Download Version 1.7 of the Free Tools, with msi Right Click to Save file. Updated June 27, 2010
- XSD: OSD Schema
- Right Click to Save file. An edited version of the Softricity.xsd file that shipped with the Sequencer 4.1. Use this with Notepad XML or other xml editor/validater. Updated December 6, 2006.
- ZIP: Replacement Sequencer Template MSI
- Right Click to Save file. A modified version of the MSI template used by the 4.5.1(CU1) sequencer. Copy the two files inside the zip to the resources folder of the sequencer, overwriting the existing files. The output MSIs of the sequencer will be different. The graphics and words on the installer dialogs are modified to make it clear that a virtual application is being installed. Also, a new command line option to those MSIs (/NOGLOBAL) tells the installer to not use the sftmime /GLOBAL flag when adding the package.
- VBS: Sample script used with virtual application MSI with streaming.
- Right Click to Save file. Rename file with "vbs" extension to use. Use to "install" a virtual application on a client installed as stand-alone with file streaming. Run with the full path to the msi as an argument. On XP/2003 you can also run without argument and it will prompt you for the MSI file. Script will also detect DSC dependencies and warn if present.
- ZIP (13kb): Touch New Again!
- Right Click to Save file. Touch is used when sequencing in two ways.
First, while in monitoring mode, to force a file to be captured that otherwise would not be included in the package because it did not change.
Seonc, in launch mode, to force a file into FB1.
- ZIP: LaunchIt (24KB)
- Program to launch other programs.
A better solution than "TERMINATECHILDREN" in the OSD.
It also catches "grandchild" processes, plus rather than killing the processes without warning it can
warn the user of (possibly hidden) processes are keeping the package open, giving them an option to kill them with
a single click or allow them to take care of them manually.
It is especially important to get these processes closed under Terminal Services, where they might keep a session open long
after the user thinks the session ended.
-
Add this file to your package, and edit the OSD manually. In the CODEBASE section, make launchit.exe the FILENAME, and make PARAMETER point to the
package executable that normally would be referenced in the FILENAME parameter. If you want to prompt the user when stuck processes are left, prepend the PARAMETER field with "/i".
- Application Recipe Links
- A list of known SoftGrid Recipe links. Some are on this site, some elsewhere.
- GenerateIconDlls PDF Description and ZIP VB Script
- This script helps solves a publishing issue for App-V virtual applications and WS2008 TS Remote App by generating application image files in a format acceptable to Remote App.
- Don't forget:
- Check out the Video Garden for videos about SoftGrid including the series "Sequencing with Tim Mangan"!
HyperV Performance
- The HyperV_Mon tool
helps you to understand Performance characteristics in a Hyper-V world.
- HyperV_Mon monitors physical, logical, and virtual performance information that is available
when running virtual machines under Microsoft Hyper-V.
The graphical display is organized to help easily understand the CPU performaces being experienced.
Detailed text displays also help highlight other performance issues such as memory, paging, and I/O.
Additional information is provided about virtualization "overhead" that is detected within the VMs.
- PDF: Documentation for HyperV_Mon
- This is the documentation for the toolkit itself.
- Updated Version 1.7 March 21, 2010
ZIP: Package Version with PDF
Perceived Performance
The Perceived Performance Toolkit for Citrix and Native Terminal Servers
helps you to set-up tests and measure end-user performance in a Terminal Server or
Citrix environment. With this toolkit you can easily create Perceived Performance
Graphs and Profiles of your environment like you see in my Perceived Performance
White Papers and seminars.
- PDF: Documentation for Perceived Performance Toolkit
- This is the documentation for the toolkit itself.
- ZIP: Package Version 1.7 (986KB)
- Latest version of Perceived Performance Toolkit.
- ZIP: package Version 1.6 (893KB)
- An earlier version.
- ZIP: package Version 1.2 (766KB)
- The original posted version, used in briForum 2005.
Tool Crib
The "Tool Crib" is a collection of tools I use in my lab to simulate bad software experiences.
These applications each exhibit a specific type of inappropriate application behavior
that you might see happen in real applications out in the wild.
This can be useful with the Perceived Performance Toolkit, or if you are trying to test some
management software that is supposed to tell you when bad things like this happen.
- ZIP: 32-bit ToolCrib May 22, 2006 version (4MB)
- An update to the 32-bit version.
- ZIP: 64-bit ToolCrib May 22, 2006 version (4MB)
- An update to the 64-bit version.
- ZIP: 32-bit ToolCrib April 1, 2006 version (3MB)
- Original 32-bit version, also contained in the Perceived Performance Toolkit.
- ZIP: 64-bit ToolCrib April 1, 2006 version (3MB)
- Original 64-bit version.
Other Tools
Some of these tools are also in the ToolCrib. A few are not, or may be more up-to-date here.
- ATM 32-bit dated August 19, 2009 (175KB )
- Investigate OS System Cache and the 7 Standby lists in RAM. Monitors cache usage and effectiveness. Also exposes
SuperFetch impact on your system under Vista, Windows 7, and Server Builds. This tool is not
in the ToolCrib.
- ATM 64-bit dated August 19, 2009 (224KB )
- Investigate OS System Cache and the 7 Standby lists in RAM. Also exposes SuperFetch impact on your system under Vista,
Windows 7, and Server Builds. This tool is not in the ToolCrib.
- ZIP: Factorial (23KB )
- Test program to consume CPU. Also in the ToolCrib.
- ZIP: Leak Memory (13KB)
- Test program to leak memory. Also in the ToolCrib.
- ZIP: LaunchIt (24KB)
- Program to launch other programs. Monitors launched process and terminates child processes when done to prevent hung Terminal Server sessions.
- ZIP: Pingtool program (42KB)
- A packet source on steroids. More than ICMP also.
- ZIP: TMnetSim Network Simulator version 2.4 32-bit (600KB)
- PC Platform software to simulate a bad WAN on a PC. Newer version than in ToolCrib, also does Packet Capture.
- ZIP: TMnetSim Network Simulator version 2.4 for x64 (600KB)
- PC Platform software to simulate a bad WAN on a PC. Newer version than in ToolCrib, also does Packet Capture.
This is a demo of TMNetSim
WMI Software
WMI is the Microsoft version of the DMTF standard for managing PCs and Servers. Programing to interface with WMI is relatively easy using just about any scripting or programing language. At briForum 2005 I gave a presentation on doing this using script as well as Visual Basic. I was asked if I could make the source code of the examples available and so here it is.
- HTML: Additional Information
- Documentation on WMI examples from Briforum 2005 presentation.
- ZIP: VB Source Code to WMI (881KB)
- Visual Studio Projects and Source Code for examples of accessing WMI from VB.
Native API
- Project to Update the
Native API for x64, Vista, & Windows
Server 2008
- The Native APIis a set of mostly undocumented interfaces into the Microsoft Windows kernel. We use this interface in a lot of development projects. But we need to stay up-to-date with additions and possible changes. This on-line project provides an indication on progress made.