Effortless Developing of Lightweight Applications Using ThinApp Technology

Table of Contents

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ThinApp Tab

Building this type of package in Advanced Installer requires VMware ThinApp to be installed on the same machine.

In order for an application to be virtualized it has to be target for a shortcut .

Click here

Package

Folder

Select the folder where the ThinApp package will be created.

Name

The name of DAT file.

Also create an MSI package

By enabling this option, aside from the virtual packages, a MSI package of your application will be created upon build as well.

Isolation

Allow the application to write to any location on the host PC (Merged isolation mode)

System elements at this location are visible to the application
Modifications to virtual elements go to the sandbox
Modifications to system elements go to the system
New elements are created on the system

For example, merged isolation is set for user-storage areas like Desktop and My Documents, so the application has direct write access to these locations.

Allow the application to read from the host PC but not to write to it (WriteCopy isolation mode)

System elements at this location are visible to the application
Modifications to virtual elements go to the sandbox
Modifications to system elements go to the sandbox
New elements are created in the sandbox

ThinApp caches the isolation modes for the registry and file system at runtime in the sandbox. If you change the isolation mode for your project and then rebuild the executable file, you might need to delete the sandbox for the change to take effect.

Compression

Fast

This option is recommend for most packages. Fast compression has a very fast rate of decompression thus it has very little impact on the application’s startup time. It achieves similar compression ratios as the ZIP algorithm and it has very little impact on memory consumption at runtime.

For example, use fast compression for slow build time, good compression ratio, and fast load time.

None

This option is useful for building your application very fast for testing purposes. No compression improves application startup time on older machines or when the application is launched multiple times. Without enabling this option, on ulterior executions of the same application, Windows disk cache can provide data faster.

For example, use no compression for fastest build time and fastest load time.

Sandbox

Name

The name of directory where the sandbox is created and stored.

Path

The path where ThinApp creates a new sandbox by default.

Reset sandbox on exit

Resets the application by deleting the sandbox when the last child process exits.

Redirect removable disks modifications to sandbox

Prevents the user from writing directly to removable disks and instead, changes go to the sandbox.

Redirect mapped network drives changes to sandbox

Prevents the user from writing directly to network‐mapped drives and changes the sandbox instead.

Permitted Groups

All users can run the package

This option removes all package usage restrictions.

Only the following Active Directory user groups can run the package

Restricts usage of the package to the specified list of Active Directory Group names.

The Access Denied Message can be customized to instruct a user who doesn’t have access to execute the package.

Advanced package options

Press the Advanced package options… to edit Package.ini options.

Topics

Package Options
Configure advanced ThinApp package options.

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Effortless Developing of Lightweight Applications Using ThinApp Technology