There's so many creative ways to make sure your Sequenced App-V applications always have
a perfect launch when it starts up. This can often be done by loading the correct config
data, and without having to do manual configurations and so avoiding error messages.
Most of the time this can be put in the registry or a config file for the
package, or scripted into the machine during the add or publishing phase with
a run once event script.
But
sometimes this will not work, maybe because another process has to be started
first, maybe because the application have a poorly designed license registration.
We may first need to check if other processes are stopped or running fine
before the virtual application starts up and can be licensed.
One way is
to create an “On process start” script for your applications .EXE file(s), this
will be started before your main executable file is started.
First thing
you do in the Sequencer, check your “Shortcuts and FTAs” tab.
If you
don’t see the correct .EXE file there I don’t know if you can do this any other
way in the Sequencer then editing your manifest.xml files with an external
editor like ACE and then importing it again. Or maybe create the shortcuts
while still in the monitoring phase.
Normally
you just choose the correct ApplicationID from the
list in the Manifest file when you open it from ACE editor.
If you
don’t see the correct .EXE file there you have to do some additional steps to
add them.
First of
all, in this example I will now use the NOT free editor AVE because it’s way
faster and safer then editing the manifest.xml files. If you don’t want to pay
for this, you could try adding shortcuts to your programs during seq. mode or
just editing manifest files with ACE.
First go to
“Virtual applications” in AVE.
Then press
the “Publish new application” button, and choose browse package for the correct
.EXE file.
Choose the
correct .EXE file and push SELECT.
Now it will
be available to use for “Start Process” scripts.
Next in this example we have been sequencing
“Phillips Intellispace”.
This
application was pretty straight forward to Sequence, but you need to be aware
that the software will always check for content verification from the IntelliSpace server. This will cause an error as it can't
write some files to the VFS. We did a quick procomon
trace, and also tried a quick shimming fix, and a junction point fix without
any luck.
If you
press the ok button it will work as it should, or wait for about 60sec
before it would auto close.
So the
application works as it should, but this error will be confusing for any enduser and that is why the user start script has been
created so it can supress this error.
Using Tim’s
excellent AppV_Manage debugger we could see the
problem process showing the error message was called AppletHost.exe
So, we
needed to make sure Applethost.exe process was intercepted and killed on every first
launch of the main program, so the error message would not be seen by the end
user.
But it was important it was only on the first launch of the AppletHost.exe, so
to make this happen we ended up making a small but effective powershell script that put a registry “detection rule” in
HKCU on the process after the first “kill”. We hooked it up on to the process
logviewer.exe.
We wrap all
our scripts into a cmd script, only running the powershellscript it would then look something like this:
powershell.exe -windowstyle
hidden -File "RegCheckandKill.ps1"
Script is
running inside the virtual Env.
Wrapped inside “userstartprocess.cmd”
This is our
small startup ps script,
running it once and creating the registrykey makes
sure it will not be killed again since Applethost.exe could still be used for
other things in the program.
We then
hooked another small PowerShell script to the exit Process script
“WorkflowHost.exe” we would then delete this registry setting so it will be
found again on next launch.
The “DeleteRegKeyonProcessExit” powershell script.
And as always, hope this will be of help to someone.
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