Neils personal site

Gus Pinto has been blogging about a new utility called Citrix Fast Launch.

I was intrigued as to what this was, so watched the videos on his site - and realised it looks exactly like something I wrote in 2001 for a large investment bank.

They were a large Novell house, and their Novell/Citrix login script took a good minute or so to run, so they wanted to decrease the session launch time. They also had an issue with users closing one application, and then getting logged out, so when they opened the next application, they had to re-run all the login script, which took ages.

To solve this, I wrote a small app in VB that run in the session and sat in the system tray and kept the session open so that subsequent application launches would fire up immediately via session sharing. The app also provided some information that could be used for troubleshooting such as client version, screen resolution, client version, IP address, and latency using the WTS APIs (no MFCOM in those days!)

A small tweak to NFuse (now Web Interface) auto-launched this "quick start" application so that the session was already logging in without the user having to select any application in WI.

Shame I no longer have the source code or I'd be able to release it to the community - in those days there wasn't much of a "community" in the Citrix world.