ICA connections using Powershell – Part 1

Since version 10.x of the ICA Client, Citrix has shipped the ICA Client Object (ICO) SDK with the installation. This allows developers to control the ICA Client. Writing managed code using ICO is a breeze (my ICAConnect tool is using it), but you can easily write Powershell scripts which leverage the SDK.

The ICOSDK is accessible by using a DLL called “WfIcaLib.dll”, which is located in your ICA Client (or Citrix Receiver) installation directory (default is “%ProgramFiles%\Citrix\ICA Client” on 32bit platforms and “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Citrix\ICA Client” on 64bit platforms). Now let’s have some fun with the ICO SDK using Powershell.

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RDP not working after XenApp 6 uninstall

A while ago I was doing a large VSI project in a XenApp environment. While the results were not what we expected, I wanted to rule out that the bottleneck was XenApp itself. So using RDP as a connection protocol instead of ICA.

After doing some changes on the servers I tried to logon using MSTSC. It gave me a nice error message and didn’t allow me to connect.

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Connecting to XenApp server through command-line

Citrix Admins out there probably know the issue; a user reports a problem and you need to troubleshoot the problem on the specific server that this user was logged on to. Logging on with user credentials to a certain server is not that easy, unless you create/modify a published desktop (or published application for that matter).

I created a little tool which allows you to easily connect to a published resource on a specific server. You can download it from the Tools section of my site and it’s called ICA Connect.

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Deinstallation of DDC not working

As said in my previous post, I had some issues with deinstalling the Desktop Deployment Controller (DDC) after configuring the reverse lookup zone to get my DDC’s working. When pressing uninstall, the process stopped within a few seconds displaying a “failed” status.

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XenDesktop DDC Connection Troubles

I’m working on a nice Login VSI benchmarking project at a customer. This is an VDI environment of 1500 machines on vSphere hosts (FlexPod hardware which has Cisco UCS Servers, Cisco Nexus switches and NetApp storage built in). We’ll be using the NetApp Rapid Cloning functionality instead of XenDesktop Machine Creation Services. I probably will blog about it when we used it and have a decent overview.

The broker software of choice is XenDesktop 5.6. Now, I did some XenDesktop installations before, but never on this scale. XenDesktop is a relative next-next-finish install, so I didn’t think I would run into problems at the installation stage of the Desktop Delivery Controllers (DDC’s). Well… I was mistaken.

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Finally starting

Well, it’s about time I put my little space on the web to some use. I’ve had this domain for over a few years already, without putting anyting usefull on it. Ok… there was this time that I created some applications for the Media Service Portal Community, but that was a long long time ago. I always had in mind to start a blog about IT-related stuff and put this space to good use.

So now I’m starting bloggin about stuff that I think is interesting or usefull to share (I say “I think”, since the word “interesting” is a subjective word). I just hope you will share my opinion on this. 🙂 Now the challenging part will be to bring and keep this blog alive.

To learn more about me, check out the About Me page.

Thanks for reading.