How to enable a WinForms application for Citrix?

Question

I have a WinForms desktop application that a few clients use and I would like to find out more about deploying it in a Citrix environment. I am not quite sure what is necessary so that my application runs without any problems on my clients' Citrix server. Any links or advice would be very useful.

Answer 1

Beyond what Falanor has said, the biggest problem most devs hit is they assume their app will only ever be used by a single user at any one time, and then hit problems when the app is run concurrently. Eg if your app tries to write to any shared/global resources then you will hit issues.

This problem is less common these days since Windows is now (a) properly locked down and access to writing global locations generally requires admin access; (b) many operations are partitioned to the current user's session, eg writing temp files.

So just keep in mind that you will have concurrent instances, and ask if there are any common resources your app will try to modify or write to.

Answer 2

The biggest issue that I have had isn't getting the application to run as I never had to make any changes to do this, but load balancing. If you reference local temporary files when it load balances you lose these. They can force your application to work off of one farm, but most places aren't interested in doing this. I've made changes to store files on operating on in a designated network share.