Sequencing a Shortcut in App-V 5.0 – Local and Virtual Interaction

This is now done within the package editor rather during the sequencing workflow itself, however the functionality is identical.

We talked about this technique in 4.x here, all these same concepts apply in 5.0 so if you are interested in the concepts jump over to the post.

What I want to discuss in this post is what has changed and how does the client handle the shortcuts we publish.

So might be thinking RunVirtual or even the new integrations we have with App-V 5.0 SP2 has pretty much deprecated this technique, however there still might be instances where you want users to intentionally use a different shortcut to trigger a certain virtual application to load in with a local process.

So what’s changed?

No much but the first change is where we configure our shortcuts:

 

Here I have added a shortcut to a local process of Internet Explorer held at “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe”

The last change is how the shortcut gets laid down on the client itself and loads the virtual environment. In App-V 4.x our shortcuts were built up from sfttray commands, this intermediary process would launch the virtual environment and then invoke the necessary executable.

In App-V 5.0 our shortcuts call executables directly as discussed here. So in order to make sure the VE is loaded when we call this local process the shortcut path is amended to:

“C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe”  /appvve:DCB70E2E-C005-46B7-86FD-63899D03F8D1_2EA3C6FE-267B-4728-BD21-4C29615AC22B

The addition of the /appvve makes sure the local process loads with the virtual environment of our App-V application.  This is all handled by our client to automatically so there is no need to sequence any differently.