Productive virtual application debugging requires an understanding of the basic fundamentals of debugging compiled software code. For this part of my series on debugging virtual applications, I will be focusing exclusively on these fundamentals. If you are already familiar with these concepts, please allow me to quickly recap these to those readers which may be either not familiar, or only somewhat and looking to solidify these concepts.

Recently I have been seeing many queries regarding shortcut icon not displayed after publishing a virtualized App-V 5.x package. The answer would be quite simple. But I would like to demonstrate it with a simple example so that it can shed some light.

For many application packagers, virtual application sequencers, and general IT pros, the concept of actual “debugging” can take on many meanings. Often the words “troubleshooting” and “debugging” are interspersed – especially when reading articles and blogs dealing with the topic of trying to dissect what may be occurring when a virtual application is not functioning as expected. When we speak of the word “debugging” in the context of its meaning with regards to programming and compiled software code, it is simply the dissection and reverse engineering of binaries to determine the root cause of an issue or basically “find the bug” in the code.

Industry expert Rory Monaghan, in collaboration with Jurjen van Leeuwen and Ruben Spruijt, released their Application Virtualization Smackdown 2016 whitepaper in early November '16.

Application Packagers usually spend some time in testing the virtualized applications in a standalone machine to confirm that the package is working fine and is issue free. In order to test the virtualized package using .appv, we need to open up a Powershell window as an administrator, and type in some Powershell commands. Though the commands are simple, they often require some time, which I feel can be reduced drastically. There are quite a few tools that provide options to test the packages without any need to do manual work, but not all customers want to use them in their environment. Hence, an idea to use a simple trick to install the App-V virtual packages in a single click without any need to open Powershell and type commands in a standalone machine. This can be achieved by a simple registry tweak to publish the virtual packages either globally, or to a user by right clicking an appv file, and using the context menu shortcut option.

Windows 10 Anniversary edition brought App-V as a built-in feature in the OS, accessible to all Enterprise users without any additional costs (until now you had to purchase the MDOP).

TweakAppV is a free tool from Advanced Installer that takes App-V 5.x editing, from the command line, to a new level, by offering full access to the package contents. You can automate any operation for hundreds of packages in minutes, saving weeks of manual work.

Assess and plan your packaging process easily by validating your applications against the App-V compatibility rules.

While much attention goes into the design of software products, when it comes to commercial software sold to businesses, it is often the installer that receives the least amount of attention when in comparison to the impact that the component has on the customer. The customer is not only the end-user that considers your application to be their personal “mission critical app“.

App-V Context Launcher is a free tool built by us that allows you to run natively installed applications inside an App-V bubble.

Advanced Installer's App-V Editor exclusively enables you to open, edit and save App-V 5.x packages from an easy to use GUI or CLI. Using our high level interface you will be able to configure various elements in the App-V package:

More and more companies choose to implement virtual applications because they offer fast and easy deployment, reduced security risks and the possibility to run multiple versions of the same application, just to name a few benefits.

When creating MSI setups it is of great help if you can get a head start and don't have to start from scratch. Advanced Installer's powerful import capabilities allow you to leverage your existing installers and projects by importing or converting them into Advanced Installer projects.