App-V 5.0 officially announced (with beta!)

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”).

For the App-V 5.0, there is now beta available for downloading. Having been able to see and access pre-beta builds of App-V 5.0, I’m pretty sure that the new version is going to surprise you quite a much, as it has a quite different architecture on the client as well as on the server side.

Old, old rumors about the change in package format are indeed true: there aren’t anymore SFT, OSDs or any of those files, now in 5.0 we only have a one .APPV package file that wraps the whole virtual application package. And the client does not have a cache or Q: drive anymore, which means that virtual application look and behave much more like the traditional installed applications.

And there’s Powershell based administration, new Silverlight -based web-console for backend management etc. etc. This, people, is a real break from the past of App-V and SoftGrid!

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This time it would be good time to remind, that we as a company are committed bringing our current App-V -related products up-to-date to the new 5.0 world. It may take a little while (after all, much has changed underneath!), but you will be able to continue using AVE and our other tools in the future with the new package format and technologies related to that!