Windows 365 & Intune Management

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

HF3 for App-V 5.1 & HF2 for UE-V 2.1 SP1

Hot fix 3 for App-V 5.1 and Hot fix 2 for Ue-V 2.1 SP1 released for public today.Check the official link for more details.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3144445

Friday, April 15, 2016

Unpublishing shows App in use error even when there is no application process running in task manager - Reason

Question: Even though when application is closed and no process or child process is running behind, unpublishing the package still shows application is in use and creates a Pending Task entry in the registry key. What is the reason? why it fails?

Answer: This issue is happening because of the Dynamic Virtualization (Just In Time virtualization) provided by the App-V 5.0 SP2 and higher. There are some applications like office, visio etc which has shell integration's that tightly integrates with the Explorer and Internet Explorer by default and are processed to use the virtual components. This is to enable support for enhanced shell extensions like context menu, drag and drop handler, drop target handler,data object handler,property sheet handler,infotip handler,column handler and preview handler.

Closing the running application, Internet explorer and trying to unpublish still shows "App in use" error.Even if we try to run the Stop-AppvClientPackage command in an elevated powershell, it will kill the running application and the Explorer to which the shell is hooked. The explorer which got closed earlier in turn will automatically restart quickly, and so making the package to be in use.You can check this using Process Explorer and searching for AppvEntsubSystems32.dll or AppvEntsubSystems64.dll. This will reveal the process that is using them.

Also you can check in CMD by using the below commands.

Listdlls.exe -v -d AppvEntsubSystems32.dll (or)
Listdlls.exe -v -d AppvEntsubSystems64.dll

Listdlls.exe is available with sysinternals tool. You can download it from here.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062.aspx

You can see that explorer.exe and Iexplore.exe are present by default in the ProcessUsingVirtualcomponents key in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\AppV\Client\Virtualization

Resolution - App-V generated MSI shows Client version 5.0 or above needs to be installed even though App-V Client is enabled in Windows 10 Build 14316

Even though App-V client is installed and been enabled, running the App-V generated msi shows the below error.

Resolution: Create a transforms for the generated MSI and remove the highlighted Installed OR APPV_CLIENT_INSTALLED launch condition.This should fix the issue temporarily.
For a permanent fix we need to wait for Microsoft to release its updated OS.

App-V & Ue-V available by default in the new Windows 10 build 14316 - First hands on review

As everyone would have already known the earlier news that Microsoft has planned to incorporate App-V in its new windows 10 release Redstone 1. Recently Microsoft has released its insider preview release for Windows 10 Build 14316. I had an opportunity to test it. Below are some interesting findings.

1. We can see the App-V files present in the C:\windows\System32 folder. One can think why Microsoft has kept the files like this instead of keeping them in a separate folder? (Ex: C:\windows\System32\App-V). Though we were not able to get answers, we have to wait for Microsoft to give its reason.

2. The same applies to Ue-V files. They are also present inside the same C:\windows\System32 folder and not in a separate folder (Ex: C:\windows\System32\Ue-V). .

3. Next we tested publishing some sample apps. it wasn't successful. The reason was that the App-V Client service was disabled by default. Turning the App-V client services manually ON worked for us. We can start the service manually to make the App-V client to work but we didn't want to. We wanted to try some other options.

4. Entering gcm -module AppVClient will return the available App-V commands.

We saw that there is a command Enable-App to enable the App-V client service. We opened elevated powershell and typed in Enable-AppV, but it didn't return anything.So we had a thought that the command didn't work.Checked the Appv client service and it seems to be have started.Reboot might be required for proper functionality.

Note: If it doesn't work, then we need to import the AppVClient first using the PS command Import-Module AppVClient to make it work. (Thanks to Roy Essers)

Also note that these commands need to be tested in x64 version of Powershell. If not it will show error.

Published an application and it works fine as expected.

You can also use the Disable-AppV command to disable the App-V Client.

So we can finally say that the Enable-AppV and Disable-AppV command works but it doesn't give any status output whether it is a success or failure. Hope Microsoft will fix this in its upcoming release.

Even though when App-V client is enabled, running the App-V sequenced windows installer (.msi) file generates the below error.

For now removing the Launch condition from the MSI worked. To know more check here.Hope Microsoft will rectify this issue too.

To Enable Ue-V, you need to use Enable-Uev command in an elevated powershell.

Note: If it doesn't work, then we need to import the UEV first using the PS command Import-Module UEV to make it work.

To disable Ue-V, you need to use Disable-Uev command in an elevated PS.