One of the necessary evils of a Terminal Services environment is testing applications to see if they will work in a TS environment. Usually, this involves installing the application on a test Terminal Server and coordinating user acceptance testing. Microsoft recently released a tool to help with this test process. The tool is called TS Application Analyzer (or tsappcompat for short).

“TS Application Analyzer is a runtime program analysis tool to enable administrators/users to determine if they can deploy an application on TS with confidence. It provides a summary of an application’s TS-incompatible behavior. The classes of application compatibility issues targeted for detection are:

1. Shared resources - files/registries
2. Access/privilege issues
3. Windows API calls with special cases for TS

The tool does the following:

1. Enables administrators to analyze test runs on a given binary.
2. Determines whether the binary will face any problems when deployed on TS. If so, the tool determines the type of problem and its severity.
3. Summarizes the findings along with a recommendation.
4. The findings can be exported and analyzed at another computer (e.g. for analysis by a test team).
5. The tool can be deployed on a set of user computers or test computers (running the client OS or the TS server OS) seamlessly. The findings can be collected at the administrator’s computer. The administrator can then analyze the findings from all computers and decide whether the application should be deployed on TS or not.

Using this tool doesn’t mean you can skip user acceptance testing, but it sure does reveal a lot of potential problems up front.

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