Developer: VMware ThinApp SDK

Exciting to see you pick up the ThinApp SDK so fast!

The target audience isn't restricted to just the Visual Studio folks, we want to make the SDK easily accessible from as many environments as possible, this most certainly includes PowerShell. If there is anything we can do to make life easier in your environment, just let us know and we'll try to accommodate you (example is the missing manifest you mentioned).

To prepare the environment, all you need to do is copy ThinAppSDK.dll and ThinAppSDKSrvr.exe to the same directory and run "regsvr32 ThinAppSDK.dll" (from an elevated command prompt). There is no need to manually start ThinAppSDKSrvr.exe. ThinAppSDKSrvr.exe is used when accessing the ThinApp SDK from a 64-bit application and is started automatically by Windows when needed.

Perhaps a little technical background: ThinAppSDK.dll is the DLL that implements the ThinApp SDK objects like ThinApp.Management. It is a 32-bit DLL, if you create a ThinApp.Management object from a 32-bit process Windows will load ThinAppSDK.dll into that process (if the DLL was registered correctly with regsvr32). However, it's not possible to load a 32-bit DLL into a 64-bit process. So if you try to create a ThinApp.Management object from a 64-bit process, ThinAppSDK.dll cannot be loaded directly into that process.

That's where ThinAppSDKSrvr.exe comes in. Windows will detect this situation and will automatically launch ThinAppSDKSrvr.exe. Since ThinAppSDKSrvr.exe is a 32-bit application, it can load ThinAppSDK.dll just fine. Windows will then "forward" ThinApp SDK calls (e.g. the GetThinAppType method call) from the 64-bit process to ThinAppSDKSrvr.exe, which will in turn forward it to ThinAppSDK.dll. The result will be passed back from ThinAppSDK.dll to ThinAppSDKSrvr.exe via Windows to the 64-bit application. This might sound complicated, but it all happens behind the scenes, you shouldn't have to worry about it.

So, the ThinApp SDK actually does support 64-bit applications. I just tried and launched a 64-bit PowerShell on Win7 x64. I had no problems running your samples. Not sure why it didn't work for you.