This posting was really supposed to have be called Secret tools of the RES Engineer, but then all of a sudden, an old Gary Larson cartoon came to mind, and ruined everything… Damn you Mr. Larson!! ;-)
Okay… so maybe a spatula isn’t gonna make the 10 o’clock news, but perhaps some other tools which are little known, which are really nice to know about would peak your interest. There is just one catch to this. You’ll have to ask around for the utilities in this article as they were really only written for internal use, but several customers and integrators got copies of them. Please do NOT contact RES Support for these tools.
Nevertheless, you ought to know about them as they can help you speed up a troubleshooting session by having the information available. Perhaps RES will make these things downloadable in the future. If this happens, stick around, RESguru will let you know.
Click here to read the article.
This PowerFuse buildingblock will help you add a Search icon to the start menu of the RES Shell. There are many advantages of using the RES Shell instead of the PowerFuse controlled explorer/aero desktop. One for instance is that it saves you about 11 meg of memory per session. Obviously this is indeed a good thing on terminal server environments.
The RES Shell was never meant to be a complete replacement of the Explorer desktop. Think more of it as an alternative. Per design the capabilties of the RES Shell have been restricted severely to only allow the most basic of user configuration. Some admins love this, some hate it, that’s why you can chose to employ it or not.
Now – sometimes we need to have things both ways, i.e. extend the core functionality a little. As you may have noticed on the start menu of the RES Shell, there is no Seach capability. You can still use the F3 keyboard shortcut when inside explorer, but in order to restore a sense of fidelity, it may be required to have it in there. Have a look at the screenshot on the right, which illustrates what the buildingblock will do.
The buildingblock contains two different searches, so you can decide which one you want to give to your users. One will start the search in the user’s homedrive, the other will start it in My Computer. The buildingblock contains a custom ressource executable called esearch.exe. This executable is a utility made by RES to make this search item possible. The utility is referenced in RES KB article Q200324 (currently requires login).
To download the PowerFuse buildingblock, click the RAR file: 
This is kinda cool. This estimation tool will let you take a qualified guess at how big your PowerFuse database will be, approximatly. Now - before you jump in to it, here’s a brief reality check. The calculator only deals with the big tables in the PowerFuse datastore, namely the PowerTrace tables. These are the ones that matter when it comes to size. The rest of the database would rarely exceed 100 Meg anyway. Just to be clear, the following items are not taken into consideration:
- Custom Resources
- Uploaded .ADM files
- Desktop and Screensaver bitmaps
- Odd-sized icons
- Other stuff you upload into the database.
The PowerTrace engine in PowerFuse will create database records the moment a user starts an application or launches a website. When the user closes the app or website, the record create earlier is updated with and end-timestamp. Each record created by PowerTrace is 512 bytes in size.
The calculator is an external spreadsheet stored at EditGrid.com, where one can make online excel calculators. Have a look at the calculator by clicking on the preview image below:
Today RES released a cool utility which will help existing XenApp customers implement PowerFuse way more swiftly. What the tool does is read existing published applications from a serverfarm, create the applications inside PowerFuse and create new PowerFuse managed published applications. It even reads any existing file associations configured in the Xenapp environment – Übercool!
There is a nice PDF which describes things well here: 
The Migration tool can be downloaded from RES here.
Remember, you saw it first on RESguru.com! ;-)
March 10, 2009 22:42 | 
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