Saturday 28 April 2012

Updated Microsoft App-V File Specification


Another quick post, as I am travelling. Currently in San Diego helping with the Quest TEC Conference.

I was sent a link today from my colleague at Quest via a Twitter link (thanks Patrick). I guess that I am a bit old school but, even though I tweet my blog posts to my friends/family/fools and I don't seem to be able to make time to tune into many other twitter feeds.

That said, this link was helpful as it led me to the updated App-V ("V Next) file description. 

You may not be aware of the "troubled" history of this kind of documentation. In the earl days of App-V, the App-V or SFT file format was important to understand and completely opaque. In addition, in those early days (2007/2008) there were very limited tools for editing and viewing. In fact, initially the Microsoft App-V SFT files were a black box. You couldn't view the contents and instead of editing files (like MSI Installer packages) you had to start all over again to make any changes to an App-V package.

As a group (ChangeBASE at the time) we were pretty keen to understand the format and paid a number of consultants to help us with the documentation and understand the file format. This effort turned out to be quite useful as it eventually led to the ChangeBASE AOK product to be able natively load App-V packages and then more recently to automatically convert MSI Installer packages automatically into Microsoft App-V applications.

Now, it's so easy - you can just download the documentation from the MS website… Makes me kinda nostalgic for the good ole days..




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