I have a VSTO-based PowerPoint add-in that runs fine on Office 2007 and Office 2010. I have users running this add-in every day, day-in, day-out.
I'm now working with a new client that uses Citrix for their desktops. I've never really understood exactly how Citrix works, but it appears that no-one has locally-installed software - they just run everything off the Citrix box. It's a very locked-down environment. They use Office 2010 and what appears to be Vista.
Anyway, my add-in is exhibiting strange behavior in this environment. Simply clicking one of my buttons on the ribbon sometimes gives an error (if the "Show addin user interface errors" setting is ON). The error says "An error occurred when calling the callback "ButtonClick".
Other times, clicking the button appears to have no effect at all (although I suspect that it's actually starting to do something and then crapping out before displaying any messages).
I'm confused, because (a) it works elsewhere, and (b) I catch and report exceptions in all my button-click handlers, so I would expect to see an error reported.
Because the environment is so locked down, and it takes literally weeks to get a new version of my add-in rolled out, I don't know how to diagnose this.
Any ideas?
Have you ever used RDP to remote into another Windows machine? To all intents you can consider Citrix to be a much fancier version of RDP. So you have a bunch of servers where users run their apps and desktops, and they connect remotely to them using HDX instead of RDP.
Your customer could be using XenApp or XenDesktop. In XenApp the users run their sessions on Windows 2008 R2 servers, with multiple users sharing each server. XenDesktop is similar except instead of connecting to a server OS, the user connects to their own dedicated workstation image. At a guess your customer is probably using XenDesktop since you say they are running on "Vista".
Diagnosing your problem is going to be tricky without access to a Citrix environment. For my debugging I'll generally install the remote debugging agent on the Citrix machine and debug remotely from my workstation. Occasionally I'll use Windbg or Visual Studio installed directly on the Citrix machine. If your customer is willing to give you access to their environment you can try this.
Other options include:
Add diagnostic tracing to your product.
Citrix provides some compatibility testing services, see: http://citrix.com/partner-programs/citrix-ready/test.html
As to what might actually be going wrong, Citrix does a range of hooking that can cause unexpected behaviour. For XenApp in particular the multi-monitor hooking is the main cause of things going wrong (I am not sure if this applies to XenDesktop as well). If you do a Google search on "citrix disable hooks" you will find a range of links that describe how to disable hooks using the registry. Disabling the hooks in this way certainly works for XenApp. I am not so familiar with XenDesktop, so I don't know if the same techniques apply. I'd certainly recommend trying disabling hooking for PowerPoint to see if your issues go away.
Related
I have to process macros in Outlook. As I login to system; Outlook launches and the processing starts, but I need to do the processing irrespective of login to system. i.e when I switch on my PC before login the Outlook should process the macros.
I tried to put Outlook in startup, regedit, scheduled the task to run but didn't get success result.
Thanks in advance..
If there is no users logged to the system, what profile should be opened in Outlook?
i need to do the processing irrespective of login to system
Microsoft does not currently recommend, and does not support, Automation of Microsoft Office applications from any unattended, non-interactive client application or component (including ASP, ASP.NET, DCOM, and NT Services), because Office may exhibit unstable behavior and/or deadlock when Office is run in this environment.
If you are building a solution that runs in a server-side context, you should try to use components that have been made safe for unattended execution. Or, you should try to find alternatives that allow at least part of the code to run client-side. If you use an Office application from a server-side solution, the application will lack many of the necessary capabilities to run successfully. Additionally, you will be taking risks with the stability of your overall solution.
Read more about that in the Considerations for server-side Automation of Office article.
Situation:
My organization has "Unified Communication" with Microsoft Lync. I occasionally have to sit at another desk, so I use a remote desktop connection to continue using my usual computer. This means I have to log out of Lync on my usual computer so I can log into Lync at the other one. When I return to my usual computer, I never remember to log back into Lync.
Question:
Is there a way I can automate the process? Like, can I do something so that every time I start a remote session with my usual computer, it automatically exits Lync, and every time I end a remote session it automatically starts Lync up again?
My experience is limited to simple batch files and Visual Basic, but I'm pretty good at learning just enough of something to do simple tasks.
Any input is appreciated. Thank you.
Lync will let you log in to multiple devices simultaneously, or end-points as Microsoft calls them. If your usual computer is locked, that device should "detect" you as away. If you are logged in to another computer, THAT one will display your presence as Available, unless you manually change your status.
There is no reason to log off of the usual computer.
Do you really need to log out of Lync at your usual computer? Lync lets you sign in to multiple devices, and will generally do the right thing in ensuring you receive any IMs/calls.
So when you switch machines, you could just sign in on the new machine, leaving the old logged in.
Or is there a specific reason why this doesn't work for you?
I may be SOL on this but I thought I would give throw it out for possible solutions.
I am writing a computer access control service to help me control my kids' computer use. Plan on open sourcing it when I have it working. It is written in VB.Net and needs to work on XP through 7.
I am running into all sorts of security and desktop access issues on Windows 7. The service needs to run as admin to execute the NetSh command to disable the network. But I cannot interact with the desktop from the service so I IPC to a UI to handle other stuff, but I still cannot detect from the service if the desktop is locked. Argghh!
I could get it all working from a hidden windows form app if I could just lick the one piece that needs admin permissions: disabling the network.
It does no good if a kid logs on and denies the popup asking if the program should run as administrator and he says no. Also windows 7 will not start a program set to run as admin using
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
Anyone know how to get this working? Or have an outside the box solution?
I wish I could provide some references, but I'm failing at my google-fu right now... but I'm pretty sure UAC doesn't apply to services. If you implement your program as a windows service application instead of a (hidden) windows forms application, and set it up to run for your kids' user accounts and not your own, that should work.
UPDATE
Found this on google, haven't played with it at all. Looks sound though... basically, CreateProcessAsUser to run the forms app from your service app that's running as administrator.
I'm looking for a way to allow potential customers to try my application before they buy it.
The product is a windows forms application that requires an SQL Server database to operate.
Although I have a functional demo that the customer can install on their network, I want to make it easier for them by have them "play" with it at my environment.
I remember Microsoft had (has?) something similar. I was testing Visual Studio a few years ago in a virtual environment where I was connecting to a server at Microsoft.
They setup the environment this way so when a user logs off after using it rollback his actions. Or to explain it better: when a user logins it starts with a new, clean environment.
So any projects I've created testing Visual Studio were lost after I logged off.
Any suggestions?
Thanks.
Some solutions that come to mind:
Provide remote access
You could provide access to a running instance of your application via some sort of remote connection protocol, e.g. via RDP or via VNC.
For example, there is a Java VNC client which can run as a Java applet; you could put that on a webpage and have it connect to a VNC session you host on your servers.
Or use Windows Terminal Server, and allow connection via RDP.
Both solutions of course have the drawback that people need to open the appropriate ports, if they are behind a firewall. There might be ways around that, however (e.g. you can run VNC over HTTP).
VM image
A completely different solution: Provide a ready-to-run VM image (for VMWare, VirtualBox or similar) of your application, including server and everything. You would need a demo version of your app though, plus getting redistribution rights for all the proprietary components (Windows OS, SQL server) might get hairy.
Offer videos
Often people do not really need to actually use the app; they are mainly interested to see how it works. So maybe it is enough to host videos of the app in operation. That allows you to put in some advertising for your features, and lets you show the users what they might miss when testing on their own.
I was wondering if anyone had some good general information on windows terminal services and how it works.
I'm wondering:
If a DLL is loaded into memory is it available for all users or reloaded for each user. (or does it depend on something else)
A specification for an example server and how many concurrent users it supports with general use....
Any issues with them, I used one a while ago and we had sporadic freezes for a few seconds every so often. This could not be tracked down to a network issue someone suggested something to do with remote printers being attached to the system. It really annoyed users seemed to happen often when going to the start menu.
Is 2008 a big upgrade in terms of performance to 2003
Terminal Services is simply like a server with multiple "remote desktop".
DLL is not shared between sessions, just like ordinal process.
You need a special license if you want to use standard Windows server
I suggest removing all the printers when you want to use it (you can also disable them in client side), but that's not a big issue
2008 is far better for performance and security, but you'd also need more recent RDP clients.