Windows Remote App / Remote IDE

Hey Everyone! Back again with some fun stuff.

Preface: this blog posts is for both programmers and tech loving people

If you already know about remote app and how to set it on Windows Server/Windows 7 please skip to the next section.
Remote App Preface:
To the programmers out there how many times have you had the wish to do something like X11 forwarding for Windows. Now there are many X11 servers out there that will help you do remote UI.
Just to be clear there are two concepts here that you should be confused with:

• Remote Host <Remote application> ->Forwards to->Your computer
• Remote Client<Remote application> <-Receives from<-Your computer

Now doing something like that with a Linux Remote Host is fairly simple process. (FYI here's a link to do that: http://www.math.umn.edu/systems_guide/putty_xwin32.html). All you are doing in this case is tunneling your remote application UI through SSH (Secure Shell) and viewing it on your local machine. Works like a charm....

But what if you wanted to do this in Windows Remote Host i.e. instead of doing a full remote desktop session just view a particular application remotely.

Here's the correct way to do it: http://drtritsch.com/2011/08/remoteapp-on-windows-7-2 

The million dollar find....

Now for the big moment, what did I find. Remote App is not very friendly with all kinds of apps e.g. Eclipse IDE (anything that is not in C:\Windows\system32\ will be a pain to setup as remote app)

What you should do is setup Remote App for cmd.exe and once you have a remote command prompt open anything you launch from it will automatically launch as a Remote App with a remote UI that you can see. You can pretty much run anything!!!!! (from Control Panel to Microsoft Lync to Eclipse IDE)

I stumbled on this when I was trying to setup Eclipse as a Remote App. (You can try all day long to get it to work but all that will happen is Eclipse launches but in the background)

One great advantage of Remote App is that you can have massive resources at your disposal and running anything on the Remote App session doesn't eat resources on your local machine. I use an RDP application on my Android Tablet and use remote app session to just use Eclipse on one of my workstations.

FYI Remote App doesn't currently support Windows Aero theme but it will run seamlessly on your computer as if it's running locally (will have it's own window which you can maximize minimize or snap in case of Windows 7/8)