I have started reading up and experimenting with ThinApp 4.6.1 and have a couple questions I have yet to see answers for.
-How do you apply updates to ThinApp'd Office? It seems to me you would have to rebuild the package on your creator pc with the updates and then redistribute. Is that correct?
-The manual says use a clean snapshot VM to do your ThinApp creation on and then remove the snapshot after the process to return to clean OS. Does this mean you typically wouldn't store your projects so you could easily rebuild? In fact, once the project has been built it is possible to run the build process again? I don't see how you would do that. Is the build process a one time shot?
-I keep seeing some errors in the build process that says white space detected in xxx.txt. Sometimes I find the whitespaces and delete them but sometimes I go to the line in the file indicated and don't see any extra spaces. I run the build and everything seems to work OK. Anyone know what's going on with that?
-In building a ThinApp with Office 2010 I use the same parameters but sometimes the resulting local machine.txt file is 40MB and sometimes it's 80+. Why is there such a big discrepancy between two builds that were done identically on the same clean VM?
-Why would I want to make my package an MSI vs a .dat file?
TIA for any insights.
Welcome ![]()
-How do you apply updates to ThinApp'd Office? It seems to me you would have to rebuild the package on your creator pc with the updates and then redistribute. Is that correct?
You have more options to apply update:
- rebuild new package (I would preffer). You can use VM to capture application, so I preffer to use snapshot technology to save machine's state before and after installing updates.
- run update inside virtual bubble. This way, changes are saved into sandbox. Then use sbmerge.exe utility to write sandbox changes into package. I would preffer this solution, because not all changes made by update can be saved into sandbox (depends on your isolation mode).
For redistribution. If you use streaming option, you don't need to redistribute. You can read in documentation on page 53.
-The manual says use a clean snapshot VM to do your ThinApp creation on and then remove the snapshot after the process to return to clean OS. Does this mean you typically wouldn't store your projects so you could easily rebuild? In fact, once the project has been built it is possible to run the build process again? I don't see how you would do that. Is the build process a one time shot?
You would keep projects, but they will be store on other machine. Some fileserver, you wouldn't have as many VMs as virtualized applications. Sometimes there is need to just change isolation mode or change some file. You do your simple change and rebuild package, but you don't need clean VM to rebuild. You can rebuild project to get new virtualized application.
-I keep seeing some errors in the build process that says white space detected in xxx.txt. Sometimes I find the whitespaces and delete them but sometimes I go to the line in the file indicated and don't see any extra spaces. I run the build and everything seems to work OK. Anyone know what's going on with that?
Nope from your description. Maybe when you write concrete problem and logs.
-In building a ThinApp with Office 2010 I use the same parameters but sometimes the resulting local machine.txt file is 40MB and sometimes it's 80+. Why is there such a big discrepancy between two builds that were done identically on the same clean VM?
If you mean HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.txt. This file stores all the changes in registry keys during installation process. So maybe those differences are caused by something else. Maybe it would be nice to compare two files and see what differences there are.
-Why would I want to make my package an MSI vs a .dat file?
DAT file is data container and it good for streaming scenario (corporate computers w/ access to corporate network). MSI packages are good for installation scenario (notebook users w/out access to corporate network).
Try to read whole documentation. I think you will like Thinapp.
Welcome ![]()
-How do you apply updates to ThinApp'd Office? It seems to me you would have to rebuild the package on your creator pc with the updates and then redistribute. Is that correct?
You have more options to apply update:
- rebuild new package (I would preffer). You can use VM to capture application, so I preffer to use snapshot technology to save machine's state before and after installing updates.
- run update inside virtual bubble. This way, changes are saved into sandbox. Then use sbmerge.exe utility to write sandbox changes into package. I would preffer this solution, because not all changes made by update can be saved into sandbox (depends on your isolation mode).
For redistribution. If you use streaming option, you don't need to redistribute. You can read in documentation on page 53.
-The manual says use a clean snapshot VM to do your ThinApp creation on and then remove the snapshot after the process to return to clean OS. Does this mean you typically wouldn't store your projects so you could easily rebuild? In fact, once the project has been built it is possible to run the build process again? I don't see how you would do that. Is the build process a one time shot?
You would keep projects, but they will be store on other machine. Some fileserver, you wouldn't have as many VMs as virtualized applications. Sometimes there is need to just change isolation mode or change some file. You do your simple change and rebuild package, but you don't need clean VM to rebuild. You can rebuild project to get new virtualized application.
-I keep seeing some errors in the build process that says white space detected in xxx.txt. Sometimes I find the whitespaces and delete them but sometimes I go to the line in the file indicated and don't see any extra spaces. I run the build and everything seems to work OK. Anyone know what's going on with that?
Nope from your description. Maybe when you write concrete problem and logs.
-In building a ThinApp with Office 2010 I use the same parameters but sometimes the resulting local machine.txt file is 40MB and sometimes it's 80+. Why is there such a big discrepancy between two builds that were done identically on the same clean VM?
If you mean HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.txt. This file stores all the changes in registry keys during installation process. So maybe those differences are caused by something else. Maybe it would be nice to compare two files and see what differences there are.
-Why would I want to make my package an MSI vs a .dat file?
DAT file is data container and it good for streaming scenario (corporate computers w/ access to corporate network). MSI packages are good for installation scenario (notebook users w/out access to corporate network).
Try to read whole documentation. I think you will like Thinapp.
Thanks for the reply. I'm sure there will be more to come once we're given the green light to proceed.
