RES on Remko's Blog

The publisher could not be verified when launching an application with RES Workspace Manager

Fri, 13 Sep 2013 15:35:25 +0000

Today I was troubleshooting a warning message that popped up when launching a network application with RES Workspace Manager:

Usually this is a simple fix: add the servername (file://server) to the Local Intranet zone:

That worked when I launched the application directly. However when launching the application with RES Workspace Manager I would still get the warning. Even stranger: when I clicked Cancel the application would still be launched.

The case of the missing audio

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 16:07:06 +0000

Yesterday I was asked to investigate a problem with a presentation pc. Even though the volume was set maximal there was not audio output.

The machine was used to connect to a Citrix XenApp desktop and RES Workspace Extender was used to integrate local applications in the XenApp desktop.

The local sound volume control was published as a subscribed application so I launched that and verified that the volume was set to Maximum:

I decided to launch the local explorer shell and noticed that there were two volume control icons in the Traybar:

Parse RES Building Blocks with PowerShell

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 13:29:20 +0000

Background
Customer uses Citrix XenApp 5 with ThinApp, RES Workspace Manager and RES Workspace Extender.

An application integration strategy is defined, the picture below displays the strategy and preferred order:

Question
Customer wanted to know the type (1..7) for all applications currently defined in RES Workspace Manager.

I decided to export all the Applications from RES WM as Building Blocks. This results in a folder with XML files. I decided to parse the XML files with a PowerShell script.

Track who created the TreatAs registry key

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:41:56 +0000

Last week I wrote about an error message the users received when opening documents from SharePoint.

The article showed how to fix the problem but it didn't feel good that I didn't know where this "TreatAs" value was coming from.

I figured that I could read the timestamp key from the registry to see at what/date time the value was created. This value can be read using the RegQueryInfoKey API but there are various tools that can read it.

PowerShell script to read Agent Guid from Automation Manager

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:00:06 +0000

From a script I needed to schedule a project in RES Automation Manager 2011 for a particular server.

This can be done with the WMC.exe commandline tool as documented in the Admin Guide. However we must specify the agent's GUID instead of it's name. We can of course use the AM console to get the agent's GUID but it's more flexible to script this.

Unfortunately there's no API we can call so I am directly quering the AM database using a PowerShell script.

The script read the database server and database name from the registry so it assumes you have the AM console installed.

Change CD/DVD drive letter with RES Automation Manager

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 15:04:34 +0000

I needed to change the drive letter assigned to the cd/dvd station from an Automation Manager project.

Although most systems only have one cd/dvd drive, some machines might be equipped with multiple drives.

A couple of years ago I wrote a tool called ChDrvLetter that can assign a specific drive letter to a partition given it's volumename. In that tool I also included an option for CD/DVD drives.

Using the CDROM [Letters] parameter you can assign specific letters to the CD/DVD drives.

Bypassing RES/Appsense Application Security

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:15:38 +0000

The video below shows a Proof of Concept of bypassing Application Security in RES Workspace Manager .

Please note that at this time the code is not publicly available so please don’t ask for it.

EDIT 2: I added a video that I received from someone who tried my Excel Sheet with AppSense Application Manager.

EDIT: I wanted to clarify a couple of things regarding this post.

First of all I would like to explain why I wrote this code and why I choose to test it with RES WM.

I had the idea about this approach a long time ago but I never got around to actually do it. The main reason was that I needed to convert Delphi code to VBA and especially converting some Windows headers was a lot of work. Then suddenly I noticed that someone had already converted the headers, so I all I had to do was rewrite the code that used it to VBA.

The choice for RES was made because of two reasons:

If you want to beat something, you want to beat the best and I most certainly consider RES WM to be one of the top products.
At the time I wrote the POC code I had access to an enviroment with RES in it.

I would like to emphasize that RES contacted me very quickly after publishing this blog. I've had contact with RES and they showed a very constructive approach with their primary goal being a fix or guidance for their customers. Hats of to RES taking a constructive approach and I will be working together with RES on this issue.

Finally I would like to state that I didn’t expect this post to draw this much attention, if I did I would have probably taken another approach.