Task Nanny: A locked down task manager alternative

 Applications, Citrix, Microsoft, VMware, XenApp, XenDesktop  5 Responses »
Jul 092012
 

Task Nanny is a locked down task manager for Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View, RDS, Terminal Services or any other locked down desktop environments in which you do not want to expose the Microsoft Windows task manager to the end user.

Unlike other free alternative task managers, Task Nanny does not show the user a (for an end user hard to understand) list of his running processes. Instead, Task Nanny shows the user the actual tasks which the Microsoft Windows task manager application tab shows, which is a lot easier and more understandable for the user.
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Farm Nanny, a Citrix XenApp farm monitor application

 Applications, Citrix, XenApp  37 Responses »
May 012012
 

Although Citrix EdgeSight is completely packed with features, it is a little top-heavy and personally I still miss the good old Citrix resource manager because it was a quick and easy way to get an overview of what’s going on with your farm and servers.
Sure there are a lot of PowerShell scripts to be found which give you an overview of your farm, but those scripts are just snap-shots of your environment.
What you really need is something that monitors your Citrix XenApp farm in real-time

After some digging around in the Citrix XenApp SDK, I decided to make my own Citrix XenApp farm monitor: Farm Nanny!

Farm Nanny is a Citrix XenApp farm monitoring application for XenApp 6 and XenApp 6.5 which will help you with troubleshooting, health checks and resource monitoring.
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Change the text size in a remote desktop session

 Applications, Citrix, Microsoft, XenApp  54 Responses »
Dec 212011
 

When connected to a Windows 2008 R2 remote desktop session, you cannot change the size of the text on your screen (font size / DPI settings).
If you go to “Control Panel” – “Display” you see the message: “the display settings can’t be changed from a remote session.”.

Especially for users with large screens and large resolutions, this can be a real problem. Continue reading »

AppSense Personalization additional registry keys overview

 AppSense  11 Responses »
Nov 292011
 

Although AppSense Personalization works almost “out of the box”, there are still a couple of user settings which do not persist after a log off.

I revisited my old list of registry keys and hiving actions and tested them out with AppSense Environment Manager 8.2 on a Windows 7 client machine.
The list below is an overview of the settings that did not persist. Add the registry keys you need to your session data (or desktop settings, if you have an older version of AppSense) to make the setting persist. Continue reading »