Nullsession.com

Want to start off by saying thank you to our audience today. Even though we had a short demo breakdown which required an early coffee-break and a few restarts you guys held out to the end.

Secondly, I’ve gotten the question why I write in English. The explanation is pretty straightforward: I’m a moderator of the Microsoft Technet Forums (http://forums.microsoft.com), these forums are in English and sometimes I write scripts or post longer answers to questions asked on my site. That’s the simple reason. (According to my statistics most of my visitors actually come from anywhere but Sweden or USA…)

We got some questions today too, I’ll repeat some of them here and the answers will come up tomorrow afternoon because my plane leaves soon. If I forgot any question here that I didn’t answer live, please email me at joachim.nasslander(at)qbranch.se.tabort and I’ll answer as soon as I can.

Question 1: Does Softgrid use BITS to transfer the applications?

Answer 1: Softgrid does not support BITS according to this post which I found on the Technet Forums:

“Sorry, we don’t support BITS in a native 4.5 deployment.  We DO support Autoload in the 4.5 release.  Essentially, you can configure the client to ensure after the application launches (FB1 downloaded) the client will continue to stream FB2 (in the background) until the application is 100% in cache.  Please note the autoloading is occuring over RTSP and is set as a lower priority process so not to impact or degrade performance for the user.

Regards Gene Ferioli

Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Application Virtualization, Microsoft Cambridge Office”

Question 2: Is it possible to upgrade an application that is sequenced with Softgrid?

The answer to this one is yes, see below:

In an Active Upgrade a new SFT file that includes the application updates is deployed to the SoftGrid server. This is recommended for updates and service packs rather than for moving to new major versions.

Reasons to use:
· Maintains user and machine customizations for the application.
· Bandwidth requirements are reduced as only the deltas of the SFT file are streamed to the client.
· Upgrade process is seamless to users
· Update is Immediately available on next application launch.
· Straightforward publishing process.

Reasons not to use:· Does not allow side-by-side existence with the original package. It is a mandatory upgrade for all users.
· New version cannot be provisioned to users separately than original package.
· For major version updates, this method is not recommended.

There are two more ways, Re-Sequence and Branching. More about that here: http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2007/11/13/softgrid-operations-guide-part-1.aspx

Question 3: Will HP-UX run on Hyper-V if you run it on an Itanium-based server? (This question is forwarded to the product group, answer will be posted as soon as possible)

Question 4: Is it possible to perform development against / use the interop-dll:s in Office for virtualized applications?

After some reading I’d say that this is not possible. Read this: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/softgrid/evaluation/virtualization.mspx and if that doesn’t answer your questions, please get back to me.

Question 5: Will Windows Media Player / other media player remember where in the movie you were if you close your session on one client and open another session? (Will try and report)

Comments are welcome too, according to the stats I have between 50-150 readers / day… Comment! That’s an order ;)