After looking around MSDN subscriber downloads for App-V downloads, I noticed that something new had been posted there just yesterday… and it looks like App-V 5.0 RTM is out now (as part of MDOP 2012 package)!

For a long time already, Application Virtualization Explorer (AVE) has had the ability to set and edit virtualized environment variables per application basis (like you could do in the Sequencer by using that cumbersome OSD -tab), but in the recently released 2.4.0 version we decided to add support for editing variables at the package level too.

We have just released a new version of AVE, version 2.4, which adds some new features and enhances the existing functionality in the product.

We have had the 32-bit fixup tool available for a while (to correct issues in App-V 4.6 packages saved out from AVE prior to version 2.2.6), but since the recent events there appeared to be a need to do the opposite as well.

Windows Team blog has just announced, for the first time publicly, development and the details of App-V 5.0. Along with the new App-V version. Along with the next App-V version, the blog post also announced Microsoft’s User Environment Virtualization (UE-V) product (which was previously known with codename “Park City”).

In the interest of full disclosure, I was recently contacted by a publisher who asked if I would like to review a new book, called Microsoft Application Virtualization Advanced Guide and written by an Argentinian(?) guy called Augusto Alvarez. As the topic sounds interesting enough, I was actually glad to have an opportunity to take a closer look at this book I actually already had heard about before.

Recently I was involved with the customer who uses, amongst the traditional App-V Management Server –based RTSP publishing, a HTTP publishing script that was posted in the App-V Team’s blog mid-2010. This script constructs necessary APPLIST information out of manifest XML files detected on a virtual directory, but unfortunately it has some shortcomings which I decided to fix and present an enhanced version here as a replacement.

Back in the last November, Sebastian Gernert who works as a Microsoft’s Support Escalation Engineer wrote an article about fixing Volume Shadow Copy –related issue with the App-V Client in the German App-V blog (browse the site with Chrome and you get handy translation prompt if you don’t read German).

While traditionally I have been a fan of doing App-V (and before that, SoftGrid) sequencing by using a locally installed virtualization software (CHV, Client Hosted Virtualization) like VMware Workstation, for some time already I have actually resorted to using our Hyper-V environment for the sequencing purposes. This is largely because I’m using a laptop almost 100% of the time, and near ultra-portable laptop is not perhaps the best platform for doing client-side virtualization due to necessity of needing external hard drives and so forth.

In this new series, we’re going to highlight some of the new features that we introduced in Application Virtualization Explorer (AVE), version 2.3, released in December last year (gosh, sounds like a long time ago when said like that!).