If you are like me running a 1280 x 1024 display resolution, you may have run into the issue of displaying a virtual machine console at 1024 x 768 display resolution inside XenCenter. Even when XenCenter is maximized I still have to use virtual and horizontal scroll bars when working on a virtual machine console. It's inconvenient to use. Here is the screen shot.

I found a solution today. After I hide the toolbar and adjust the width of the left column, the VM console can be used without relying on scroll bars.

Here is the screen shot.

To disable toolbar, go to View menu and uncheck ToolBar option.

Check out the new XenServer.
Here is the new community site.

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
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The issue

Many people have encountered problems with clipboard (cut and paste) not working in Citrix XenApp ( formerly Presentation server/Metaframe) environment.

The cause

A not well behaving non-Citrix application can interfere with clipboard operation and cause problems with XenApp. A complete fix would require changes to the windows operating system.

Workaround exists but has limitations.

My colleague Dmitry Vostokov wrote a tool called RepairCBDChain to work around the issue. It works, but it is not easy to use, especially for end users.

A fix was incorporated in XenApp plugin (client)

Back in 2005 when I was still in Engineering department, I started tacking this problem. I found it a challenging but fun problem to solve since I can't modify bad third party applications nor the operating system. And the problem happens intermittently.

After quite some effort, I found a way to allow the XenApp Plugin to detect broken clipboard and fix it automatically. I was happy and thought my job was done.

Here is the detailed information about the fix. The fix has been included in XenApp plugin (client) since 2005 version 9.100.

Our internal tests showed that the fix was effective. Some people in our support forum and blog have also reported successful use of my fix.

http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=57670&tstart=0
http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=88284&tstart=0
http://community.citrix.com/x/l4TeAQ

The fix is disabled by default unfortunately and was not well publicized.

The story didn't end though. To reduce potential side effects, the feature was disabled by default. I didn't agree with the decision but went alone. Unfortunately, the fix was buried in long release notes and not well publicized. As a result, not many people seem to know about the fix, including even XenApp experts. For example please see the comment section of this blog dated 2008 . And this blog. Another evidence is that RepairCBDChain is still one of the top downloaded knowledge base articles recently. I am disappointed that users haven't benefited as much from my hard work as they should have been.

Should it be enabled by default now?

I wonder if this fix should be enabled by default now. After all, what good is a fix if people don't know how to take advantage of it? In my opinion, the fix doesn't have much risk. If it does have bad side effects, after all these years, people would have reported problems with the fix already. What do you think?

Related articles.

Citrix KB articles about clipboard issues
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX104631

Articles about RepairCBDChain tool.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX106226

http://www.dumpanalysis.org/blog/index.php/2007/06/21/repair-clipboard-chain-201/

http://www.dumpanalysis.org/blog/index.php/2006/12/09/clipboard-issues-explained/

Jeff's blog about clipboard in general.
http://citrixblogger.org/2007/05/27/the-citrix-clipboard-part-i/
http://citrixblogger.org/2007/05/30/the-citrix-clipboard-part-ii/

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
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Citrix just announced the new Citrix Receiver for iPhone. And a companion utility was also released called Citrix Doc Finder. As one of the creators of this utility, I will explain some of the history and rationals behind this product.

The leap from no access to access anywhere

Together with Receivers for other mobile devices, Citrix technology now allows you to access applications not available to mobile devices before.

You may wonder how usable the applications designed for desktops are going to be on small screens. It is surprisingly usable especially on the iPhone with the relatively large screen and multi-touch capabilities. Give it a try yourself. It certainly beats not having access at all.

The challenges with fitting desktop applications in a small screen

But can we do better? Certainly. Take windows file explorer for example. Although powerful, the interface is not ideal for mobile devices. For instance, the fonts are too small and especially not good enough for my fingers. I wouldn't blame my finger being too fat As the result, opening a file takes too much scroll, zooming and panning than necessary.

One solution "re-skin"

What if we modify the user interface to optimize it for mobile devices? Many web sites have mobile sites. But I am not aware of any good existing examples of mobile version of windows applications yet. Are you?

Why file explorer?

There are many windows applications we can "re-skin". Given that most people are likely going to want access their corporate documents on mobile devices, it seems logical to create a mobile version of windows explorer as the first example.

Why not implement Doc Finder as a native iPhone application

Yes, it is possible and I've given it serious consideration.

I can think of two possible approaches of a native iPhone implementation. Both have the advantages such as utilizing the iPhone graphics, animation etc. Both have their drawbacks though.

• Download files to iPhone and open it natively.
  Cons: Poses additional security risks since files need to leave corporate network. And iPhone's capability to handle many file types is still lacking

• Download directory and file information only and use XenApp to open selected file.
  Cons: Requires a web service which needs to be accessible outside corporate network. May require changes to core XenApp product. It seems more complex than simply deploying another modified application on XenApp.

More importantly I would like to help non-iPhone mobile users as well. Implementing Doc Finder as a windows application hosted on XenApp gives me the advantage of serving a broader mobile user base with a single code base.

Since I know windows development pretty well already, I can build Doc Finder quickly. It would be a daunting task to build a separate application for many different mobile platforms.

My development experience.

It took me only a few days to come up with a functional prototype. And it proved so useful and it was productized in a very short amount of time.

Where to find more information

Here is a demo video of Citrix Receiver and the Doc Finder. Doc Finder section starts at around 5:20.

Here is the direct link to that part of the video.

Here is the complete video demo.

Doc Finder is featured in the free demo at CitrixCloud.net. Please give it a try. For more information and to download it, please visit Doc Finder community site. Your comments and suggestions are appreciated. I encourage you to use this user forum for Doc Finder related discussions.

What's next?

But wait, similar type of optimization should be possible to many other types of applications as well both windows applications and web applications. I will leave that subject to another blog.

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
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Citrix is a proud sponsor of this year's Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) Walk for the Cure again and will generously match donations Citrix team raises. I will be walking with the rest of Citrix team this Saturday morning, March 14. See JDRF site and the poster picture for more details.. This year's venue has changed to the beautiful Flamingo Gardens in Davie. Citrites, family members and friends are welcome to walk with us as part of Team Citrix. I was told that even if you didn't register, you are welcome to come walk with us. Making people aware of the disease is an important goal as well.

I am encouraged by the support I've received from my friends and colleagues especially given today's economic environment.

Please help spread the message. No matter how small your contribution is, together we can make millions of lives better!

Thanks

Ray

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
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I came across an interesting project that University of Michigan is doing called PowerNap

Basically the goal of the project is to put servers to sleep quickly when they are idle and wake them up quickly when they are called for again.

Here are some interesting quotes from the article:

"The Environmental Protection Agency expects the energy consumption of the nation's data centers to exceed 100 billion kWh by 2011, for an annual electricity cost of $7.4 billion. Those figures are about twice what they were in 2006, when data centers already drew more electricity than 5.8 million U.S. households."

"For the typical industrial data center, the average utilization is 20 to 30 percent. The computers are spending about four-fifths of their time doing nothing," Wenisch said. "And the way we build these computers today, they're still using 60 percent of peak power even when they're doing nothing."

It's a well recognized problem, I think. But I've yet to see an effective solution. I hope PowerNap will become one by itself. I think such technology can achieve its full potential by coordinating with not only operating systems but also applications such as Citrix infrastructure. For example, the applications can help making more intelligent decisions of where to route the traffic to increase the chance and duration that a server can be turned into a power saving mode. Today Citrix's products drive a large share of DataCenter work load, I think Citrix can play an important role in addressing this important issue.

I led an experimental project called PowerSmart not too long ago. The basic idea is to funnel the load to a smaller set of servers so that the rest of the servers can be powered off during off peak hours. But the project was suspended due to lack of resources. The good news however is that the development team has picked up the concept and is working on something better. I will blog more once I get clearance to do so.

What I am curious about is how the bad economy is going to affect the investment on "Green IT technologies". According to the articles, it sounds like saving energy in the data centers may still make sense as far as return on investment is concerned even in today's economy. What do you think?

Do you think companies will invest in Data Center Power Saving technology in today's environment?	Choose
yes
no

Of course, there are many variables in making investment decisions. I would appreciate it if you could elaborate in the comment section.

Here is another article I found titled "digital Diet - Computing industry gets serious about energy conservation" that offers additional data.

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
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Have you seen the error "You have chosen not to trust XXX Server CA, the issuer of the server's security certificate (SSL error 61)." on Citrix Linux Plugin for XenApp (formerly known as ICA client)? It may be because the certificate authority from whom you get your server certificate is not trusted by your client.

I've got questions from users about this error. And I've made a request to product team to mitigate this issue. Please see comments from my earlier blog.

There are articles you can find on the Internet which describe a solution. However some users found videos more helpful than text only version. So I decided to create a video version of it.

You will need to download the right certificates. If you have questions, you may want to ask your server administrators or your certificate authorities who issue your server certificates. Alternatively you may be able to export the certificates you need from your firefox browser on the same Linux machine.

Here is an article I found that contains useful text based instruction and has a script that automates the process. You may need to customize the script to fit your needs.

I hope in the future, the product team can find ways to mitigate this issue. One step is to trust more certificate authorities by default. It's not difficult to implement. But I was told it might require some legal work to redistribute certificates from third parties. Another possibility is to share the trust with Firefox which will require more develop work. What do you think? Do you know how other Linux applications solve this issue?

Here is my earlier blog that explains how to install and use Linux ICA client.

I'd love to hear your feedbacks.

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
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Citrix online group released a beta version of new product called GoView this week.

Here is my first look at this product. I would like to share a short demo recording I created using GoView and some tips and tricks I learned from this first try.

Install:

I signed up at goview.com web site

I got it up and running with a few clicks and under a minute. Time may vary depending on your network and compute speed.

Record my first screen cast:

I didn't have to read any document and I was able to create my first test screen cast without any trouble. And the performance is good. Please see my test recording.

Things I like and things that differentiate this product:

• Simplicity. I've used other similar products. This product doesn't have all the bells and whistles. But it is definitely the simplest and easiest one to use I've seen.

• Video is uploaded while I am recording. I don't have to perform an additional upload step.

• Ability to protect shared video with a password.

• Easy and intuitive editing tool to cut out the unwanted portion. The tool also allows a slide show to be inserted which is useful for transition into another sequence.

• Ability to download your recordings as MPEG-4 files.

Things I would like to see added:

• Ability to embed views in my blog

• Ability to zoom in and out of an area while recording.

I was told that the GoView product team has these features on their list for future development consideration already.

Additional demo videos that may be helpful:

These videos include audios.

• How to record

• How to Edit

• How to Manage & Share

Tips and Tricks:

• If you use dual monitors, you may want to move your desktop icons and windows task bar to your secondary monitor, so that your primary monitor has a clean background for recording.

• You can pause recording when you need to prepare the screen for the next sequence and resume when you are ready.

Your turn:

GoView is free during the beta testing. Give it a try yourself at http://goview.com

Send your feedback via the feedback link on help page. I got my response back in an hour. The team is listening.

I'd love to hear your experience and see your own cool demos.

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
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After seeing Vishal's blog about the Extentrix Internet Explorer Toolbar, I tried the tool myself.

Here are some features I like.

• Show and hide applications or folders. In effect, you can have your favorite published applications on your IE tool bar.
• Ability to auto launch applications you select when IE starts up.
• Ability to specify a parameter to a published application. This feature may be handy if you are going to use a published MS word to edit a file you have on your local machine for the next few days for example.

There are other UI features that are neat too.

The interface for specifying the logon credentail doesn't seem very intuitive to me. But I didn't read admin guide I guess I am not alone. Make sure you specify the full PN agent URL in this version. It won't take just the server name.

 You can download it from this link.

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
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This is a follow up to my earlier blog.

Do you wish to use your iPhone to access Flash based applications? So far you are out of luck. According to the recent news article from CNET, "Flash 10 coming to most smartphones in 2010". And iPhone is not on the list.

But why wait? With the upcoming Citrix receiver for iPhone, you will be able to run Flash based applications not only from iPhone but also from many other popular mobile devices. Initially the focus will be to support business applications.

The Citrix technology also adds another additional layer of security by only transmitting the display to the mobile devices. A typical flash based business intelligence report may contain sensitive data. If downloaded directly to a mobile device, the data may be vulnerable to leaks. For business users,the added security may be important.

Here is a quick preview of what is to come.

Here is the iPhone friendly version

A business intelligence application is demonstrated above. You can find the demo application at this Adobe web site.

If you know any Flash enabled web application/sites that may be useful when accessed from iPhone, could you let me know by posting comments?

Please check out our iPhone project community site for more details.

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
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A group of volunteers from Citrix formed a Green team recently to promote "green" initiatives i.e. protect environment and reduce waste. 

One of the recent initiatives the team launched was called "Mug Day". Here is how it works:

Citrites present a mug to their floor captain, pledging to use it instead of disposable cups.They will be entered for a drawing.

As one of the floor captain, I was encouraged by the partication. Here is what one floor captain wrote afterwards:

"..On my floor, 29 engineers proudly showed me their coffee mugs for this raffle. Some of the mugs were brand new, purchased just for this raffle, possibly the only mugs these young guys own. .."

This experience shows that people do care and will respond if they are given an opportunity to do their part in some small but tangible way. I am proud to be working with such a group of people.

As a technology company, Citrix offers products that help people be green by enabling remote working, reducing physical machines etc. I created an experimental project called "Citrix PowerSmart" specifically for reducing power consumption. There is more to come. I will blog about them when I get clearance to do so

I want to share our success story with you and would like to hear yours. I hope we can learn from each other. Please comment if you have something to share.

Thanks

Ray Yang

My blogs

Two days ago IBM announced the availability of 4 of their products on Amazon EC2 cloud. Check it out here.

It's another indication that cloud computing is gaining momentum. If you look closely though only virtual machines for development and demo purposes are available now. But IBM says production version is going to be supported too. The fact that IBM, the enterprise company, is trying EC2 says something. That's probably why the story has been making headline news. I am interested to know if IBM will create their competing cloud platform for enterprise in the future. What do you think?

I am not surprised with this IBM announcement since my group has been doing something similar. Chris Fleck announced unofficially the availability of popular Citrix XenApp on EC2 last week. Chris included a very informational video with step by step instructions on how to get your XenApp running in the cloud in 15 minutes. I found it very useful. I would rather prefer watching a 15 minutes video than reading a long getting started guide!

Plus the IBM getting started guides recommended EC2 command line tool. In Chris' video, he showed how to use the new Amazon EC2 GUI console. I tried Chris' method to launch IBM instances. It worked for me. So for the folks like me who prefers GUI over command line, you may find Chris video useful too even if you are only interested in trying out IBM products on EC2.

Let me know what Citrix products you would like see in Amazon EC2.

Ray

Do you wish to use your iPhone to access Silverlight enabled web sites? Silverlight is growing in popularity. Check out the Silverlight showcase.

While currently iPhone doesn't support Silverlight natively, you will soon be able to view Silverlight powered cool web sites via Citrix Receiver for iPhone. Here is a quick preview of what is to come.

Did I forget iPhone doesn't support Flash? Here is an iPhone friendly version. I will blog about Flash on iPhone soon.

A business intelligence application is demonstrated above. You can find the demo application here.

Some Silverlight applications will work better on iPhone than others. But at least you have an option to use them now. Citrix also enabled opportunities to optimize Silverlight enabled web sites for iPhone. More on that later.

If you know any Silverlight enabled web application/sites that may be useful when accessed from iPhone, could you let me know by posting comments?

Please check out our iPhone project community site for more details.

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
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I've been working on the ICA on iPhone project recently and I had to move a new build from my development machine to my test server frequently. At first I tried RDP. But it is painfully slow to copy my binary to the test server for me. Then I tried ICA and it worked much better. The experience made me appreciate the efficiency of ICA more.

Seeing is believing, I've captured my experience in a video. If you use client drive mapping, you might be interested in checking out this video.

Dicscover more Citrix related videos at the Citrix utipu video site

Ray Yang

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For those who are looking for a place which aggregates Autodesk and Citrix related technical information, I've created a page on Citrix Developer Network at

http://community.citrix.com/display/xa/Autodesk+Citrix+Best+Practices

Your feedbacks are welcome.

AutoDesk and Citrix Tips and Tricks Part 4

Here is a video demo of how to apply Autodesk AutoCAD Map 3D 2009 on XenApp post installation script.

Dicscover more Citrix related videos at the Citrix utipu video site

For more information and download the script, please visit the following link

 http://community.citrix.com/display/xa/Autodesk+AutoCAD+Map+3D+2009+on+XenApp+post+installation+script

Tip:

• You can find a log with details about the execution of the scripts in the user profile directory named AutodeskForCitrix.log
• The template directory in which the information is saved has to exist before running the scripts
• Change the batch files to use a different directory to save information. Network share is supported
• Run the apply script automatically whenever a user logs in

Please see my blogs for the complete series.

Ray Yang

AutoDesk and Citrix Tips and Tricks Part 3

How to publish AutoCAD Map3D 2009 on XenApp

Here is  a short demo of publishing AutoCAD Map3D 2009 as a published application on XenApp.

Dicscover more Citrix related videos at the Citrix utipu video site

Tip: publish executable acad.exe

How to change published Map3D 2009 icon

When you use the default settings to publish AutoCAD Map 3D 2009 on XenApp, the icon associated with this published application is different from the official blue icon the installation placed on the desktop. This short demo shows how to associate the right icon with the published application.

Tip: get the icon file location from the desktop shortcut property.

Please see my blogs for the complete series.

Ray Yang

To start with, here is a short demo video of how to install AutoCAD Map3D 2009 on XenApp I created.

Discover more Citrix related videos at the Citrix utipu video site

Note that AutoCAD Map3D 2009 requires you to use network based license which is not default option. If you don't read the installation guide carefully, you can mistakenly take the default option.  If the wrong model (standalone license) is chosen, at most two users can connect concurrently. And there is no easy way to change the license model after installation is completed. Initially I made the mistake of choosing the default option and had to re-install .

Please see my blogs for the complete series.

Ray Yang

I've been working with AutoDesk for a while to ensure AutoDesk products can work well with Citrix products and create new solutions.

I'd like to share what I learned with the community. Thus I am creating this tips and tricks series to cover all things that are related to AutoDesk and Citrix. I will try to cover mainly technical information, tips and tricks. But I may include other useful information as well.

Many thanks to everyone who helped with this on-going effort!

If you would like to hear more about certain aspects of AutoDesk and Citrix related solutions, please leave comments on my blog. I'd love to hear from you.

Ray Yang

Would you rather watch a short instruction video than reading pages of instructions? Now you can. I've been working with Citrix support team to enhance the existing knowledge base web site with relevant videos.

Here is one example. We recently linked a "CitrixTip" video from our Citrix tip video site with the relevant knowledge base article. You can find the video link in the summary section of the knowledge base article. This video shows how to gather debug trace on Citrix XenApp servers.

Many thanks to the colleagues from our knowledge center team to make this happen.

Discover more Citrix related videos at the Citrix utipu video site

Is this video useful?	Choose
yes
no

Would you like to see more such videos on Citrix support web sites?	Choose
yes
no

Please leave your comment if you have any suggestion. It's your chance to make the knowledge base site even more useful to you.

Ray Yang

Please expand to view the English version. You will need Chinese fonts to view the section in Chinese.

您好！欢迎来访思杰博客。

新的博客现在开始支持包括中文在内的多国语言。 您现在可以用您最熟悉的语言来分享您的观点和信息。

作为在思杰总部工作多年的中国人，我很愿意为华人用户和同事提供更好的服务。欢迎您留言或来信。我会很感谢您的建议。

这个博客有很多信息，可惜到现在为止都是英文的。如果我们提供多种语言的翻译工具是不是会对您有帮助？比如说像谷歌的翻译工具。

全英文的博客是不是烦碍您发表您的博客？	Choose
是
否

全英文的博客是不是烦碍您使用思杰博客	Choose
是
否

提供多种语言的翻译工具会不会有帮助？	Choose
有好处
没用

杨瑞国

高级设计师

解决方案市场部

我的其他博客

----

If you are wondering what the above is about, here is the English Translation. Now you get an idea of how helpless a non-English speaking person may feel 

Citrix blog now supports blogging in non-English languages including Chinese and others. You can now blog in your favorite language. This blog is an example of it.  I am interested in your suggestions and feedbacks to improve the usefulness of this blog to non-English speaking users.

Will on demand translation such as google translation tool help?

If English is not your native language, please vote below.

Is English only blog a barrier for you to blog	Choose
yes
no

Is English only blog a barrier for you to consume information?	Choose
yes
no

will in page on demand translation help you get most out of Citrix blog?	Choose
Yes
No

Ray Yang

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