GPU acceleration is en vogue. After slowly but steadily moving out of the 3D niche it has arrived in the mainstream. Today, applications like Microsoft Office leverage the GPU, but even more so do web browsers. Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer all have hardware acceleration turned on by default. People generally seem to be happy about that - GPUs are super-efficient, the more work they do the fewer remains for the CPU, overall energy consumption is reduced and battery life increases. Or so the myth goes. Interestingly, facts to prove that are hard to find. Nobody seems to have measured how GPU acceleration affects CPU usage. Let’s change that.

This is the fifth in a series of articles on folder redirection by Aaron Parker, Helge Klein and Shawn Bass. Part one: How Folder Redirection Impacts UX & Breaks Applications Part two: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Logon and Application Launch Part three: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Start Menu Search Part four: Measuring the Impact of Folder Redirection – User Logon Part five: this article Previously on this Series If you have been following this mini-series you know that after explaining the basics in part one we got to the juicy bits in parts two and three, where we presented videos that vividly show that folder redirection indeed speeds up user logons considerably, but at the price of potentially horrible user experience during the session. In part four Aaron Parker published our measurements of how folder redirection affects logon duration. This fifth part is about the effect folder redirection and SMB version can have on application launch speed.

This is the third in a series of articles on folder redirection by Aaron Parker, Helge Klein and Shawn Bass. Part one: How Folder Redirection Impacts UX & Breaks Applications Part two: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Logon and Application Launch Part three: this article Part four: Measuring the Impact of Folder Redirection – User Logon Previously on this Series If you have been following this mini-series you know that after explaining the basics in part one we got to the juicy bits in part two, where Aaron Parker presented videos that vividly show that folder redirection indeed speeds up user logons considerably, but at the price of potentially horrible user experience during the session. In this third part we are going to explore that in more detail.

My recent post about things I dislike about PowerShell provoked some interesting reactions (see the comments). Several readers argued that PowerShell is not supposed to be a full-blown programming language but a kind of super-advanced shell scripting tool.

With all the love PowerShell is getting these days one might think that the golden age of (Windows) scripting has finally begun. Maybe it has. But one man’s nirvana can be another man’s hell.

This is the first in a series of articles on folder redirection by Aaron Parker, Helge Klein and Shawn Bass. Part one: this article Part two: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Logon and Application Launch Part three: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Start Menu Search Part four: Measuring the Impact of Folder Redirection – User Logon Why Even Talk About Folder Redirection - in 2014!?! Working in the SBC/VDI space without stumbling across folder redirection is about as easy as travelling from Europe to the US as an IP packet without going through a Cisco router.

If you install the Citrix XenDesktop 7.6 Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA) on a small Windows 7 VM, you may be in for a big surprise, and not a good one. This article documents issues I have experienced and how to work around them.

Last updated: 2017-01-21. This article still applies to the latest versions of GoToMeeting. The high disk space usage has not been solved yet. Am I running the latest version of GoToMeeting? Which is the latest version, anyway? Those trivial questions might not be easy to answer.

I am more than happy to announce that I won a Splunk’s Revolution Award in the category developers. The winners were presented on the big screen during the keynote. My slide reads:

Virtual hard disks have the same tendency to grow in size as regular disks have to fill up. Deduplication is a great way to battle this, but unfortunately it is not available for Windows 8 Client Hyper-V. I know that hacks are available describing how to transfer the relevant DLLs from Server 2012 but I value my data too much to try that. The only thing left in order to regain valuable (SSD) disk space is to compact the VHDX. That, however, is more difficult than it should be.

In the past years I have attended many different conferences and user group meetings. Apart from the fact that every single one of them was great and definitely worth the while they all had another thing in common: getting there involved a significant amount of travel, in most cases to other countries or even continents. Whenever I read someone’s account of a local community meeting I was a tiny little bit envious that they had such things near their homes and I did not. High time to do something about it!

The most important change in version 2.0 of uberAgent is the new architecture. In addition to that we have made many other improvements, significantly reducing the agent’s footprint while increasing the quality of the collected data.

Creating an installer that does not suck is hard. The tools available are expensive, inadequate, overly complicated and/or poorly documented (pick any combination). WiX is one of the better choices. It is free and it is used for some Microsoft products. But WiX is just a wrapper around MSI and as such is unnecessarily difficult to use. In an effort to make life better for fellow developers I am publishing the full source code of uberAgent’s installer here.

You have probably heard of Splunk, but can you describe what it does to a colleague in a few sentences? That is not easy. Splunk does not belong in any traditional category but stands apart from the crowd. That makes it interesting, but also the explaining harder. Here is my attempt.

Note: The installation described in this article worked very well for me. However, nine years after publishing this post I replaced this setup with a more modern dockerized installation that is easier to maintain. PHP upgrades, especially, are a lot simpler.

There are many possible reasons for wanting a fast server well connected to the internet. Some may want to move their lab from their powerful but heavy laptop to the cloud so they only need to carry around a lightweight ultrabook. Others may want to set up a demonstration system for their software or solutions portfolio. I primarily wanted a fast webserver.

I love to learn, teach and network. Conferences and community meetings are the perfect events for that. As in previous years I try to attend as many events as I can. Here is a list of where I have been this year and where I plan to be. I hope you can make it to at least one of these, they are all more than worth it!

How do you programmatically determine if an application is running in a session accessed over a remoting protocol (i.e. ICA aka HDX or RDP)? It may be Citrix’ strategy to completely hide the fact that a session is remoted - which makes sense in many ways - but in some cases developers simply need to know in order to optimize their applications. It is surprisingly difficult to find official documentation about this. Here is what you need to know.

Having a hypervisor built right into the client operating system is a great thing, especially if it is as fast and stable as Client Hyper-V found in Windows 8. The functionality is very good, too, but a single feature is sorely missing: the ability to share the host’s (internet) network connection.

This is a collection of useful tips and resources for developing Splunk apps. For an explanation of the available app types please see my earlier article on the topic. Splunk Search References and Guides Splunk publishes two excellent resources for learning and working with its search processing language (SPL):

When you start with developing apps for Splunk the first big question you hit is a bit unexpected: which technology do you work with, which app type do you choose?

Switching over to a new computer is certainly fun for a geek, but getting back to a perfectly tuned configuration can be a lot of work, whether you synchronize (part of) your data to the cloud or not.

Having made the switch from my trusty Lenovo T520 to the W540 here is my account of what works well and what does not. If you wonder what made me choose the W540: read this.

Tools that monitor network traffic typically work with IP addresses, not server names. Humans, on the other hand, seem to prefer names over cryptic numbers. Most tools deal with that by doing reverse lookups of the IP addresses, i.e. they are looking for DNS PTR records. The result of such a lookup, however, is not always what you expect. Let us look at a simple example: