Vishal Ganeriwala recently reported that Citrix’s Dr. SDK has written a new white paper titled “The Ultimate Guide to MFCOM” (MFCOM is the API for Citrix Presentation Server/XenApp). The white paper covers everything up to SDK version 4.5 including advanced MFCOM topics such as multi farm management, publishing different types of applications, policies, load evaluators and more. This guide goes very deep into the internals of MFCOM, but it is written in such a way that beginners can pick it up. Most of the examples are presented in VBScript format, but you can apply these principles other languages (such as C#, VB.NET, C++, etc.). There is an interesting blurb at the end of the white paper about a PowerShell-based interface:

“PowerShell is a Microsoft command and scripting interface that is gaining wide support and user acceptance. Citrix is considering to develop a PowerShell-based interface to replace MFCOM entirely. Part of the reason for such a consideration is that most of the farm and server properties will be moved Active Directory. That will result in a large portion of MFCOM properties being invalid.

The PowerShell-based interface offers the following advantages over MFCOM:

1. It is task-oriented interface. Commands are defined for performing specific tasks.
2. It does not require registration on the client side.
3. Commands are directly exposed to an end user. There is no need for writing scripts to access the commands.
4. Commands will be simpler. Most of the scripts written in this document can be re-written just as the command line specs.

Continue at source…

Technorati : API, Citrix, Development, MFCOM, PowerShell, Programming
Del.icio.us : API, Citrix, Development, MFCOM, PowerShell, Programming
Ice Rocket : API, Citrix, Development, MFCOM, PowerShell, Programming