Download from here: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/developer/forums/thinapp
The SDK offers lots of advantages over thinreg and will be faster as it does not require Windows to shell out.
The one bit of preparation we need to do is for any desktop going to register ThinApps. With a View environment this is quite straightforward as you can do the following steps to the Master or Parent VM
- Copy the ThinAppSDK.DLL (from the SDK download) into the Windows\System32 directory
- In a CMD prompt (with Administrator rights) register the DLL with: REGSVR32.EXE THINAPPSDK.DLL
First we need to create an object so we can call the ThinApp commands:
Set TAManagement = CreateObject("ThinApp.Management")
We also need to create a variable to hold the Package while we work with it.
Dim Package
We can now set this variable to the thinapp we are going to work with:
Set Package = TAManagement.OpenPackage(\\server\share\Adobe Reader 9.exe)
This now allows us to Register a package with: Package.Register 1
And Unregister a package with: Package.UnRegister
I put this together into this login script
Here's a link to download the login script. just remove the .txt extension to leave this as a .vbs file - https://sites.google.com/site/vkiltblog/view_login_sdk.vbs.txt
Save the text down in a vbs file and add it into the GPO that you should have created and linked to the OU that houses the View desktops. See my previous post on details on setting up a GPO for View: GPO's for View
You may look at the script and ask why I'm not using wildcards, why I'm checking for group membership and why I'm checking for registry entries. The simple answer is to speed up the execution of the login script and provide minimal disruption to the user on login. If we use wildcards or don't check the registry then subsequent registers will always be attempted. This can cause the screen to flash and slow down the login. I prefer to specify the thinapp, the group entitled and the registry key so we don't even attempt a register or unregister if it's not necessary. It also makes unregister's cleaner.
To make this repeatable I put the register and unregister in functions and then defined the variables to call that with.
For each application we define the following:
ADGroup = "Adobe Reader"
FileName = "\\server\share\Adobe Reader 9.exe"
RegKey = "Software\Thinstall\ThinReg\Adobe Reader 9_28503025"
CheckReg = True
DebugMsg = False
where:
ADGroup = The AD Group that is entitled to the app
FileName = "Full name and path of ThinApped exe"
RegKey = "Registry Key created when registered under HKCU"
CheckReg = True or False, where True will check the registry to see if the ThinApp has already been registered
DebugMsg = True or False, where True will popup message on register or unregister
We can then call the function for each application to either register, unregister or do nothing.
RegUnRegApp ADGroup, FileName, RegKey, CheckReg, DebugMsg
You can also change the DebugMsg variable to True and you will get a pop up message on each register or unregister. You can also turn off the Registry Check by changing CheckReg to False (this is useful when registering a new application and you don't know what registry key will get created by the register). Note that when we don't check the registry each time a user logs in, we will attempt to either register or unregister based on their group membership every time.
More scripting examples can be found here.
