http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/dws-storefront-10/dws-version-wrapper.html

Citrix Storefront 1.0 replaces Citrix Delivery Services 1.0, and is a slick means of allowing users to subscribe to published applications/desktops via either a Citrix Receiver plugin or web interface. The web interface is called ‘Receiver for Web’ and offers exactly the same look and feel as when double clicking on the Receiver desktop icon.

In contrast to Citrix Web Interface 5.4 (with its blue and white styling) Citrix Storefront 1.0 offers a pretty green ‘Receiver’ workspace with initially no applications. Users are prompted to add applications from a pull-out list determined by an XML broker exchange with one or more Citrix farms. This approach allows users to add from a larger catalogue only those applications that they want to have available within their primary list of applications. Once added, these application subscriptions are stored within a simple SQL database so that each time that the user logs in his/her favourite applications are available for use. Additional applications can be added to their workspace at any point in the future by revisiting the pull-out menu.

Figure 1 – subscribed list of applications (with two auto-subscribed apps on the right hand side)

What Storefront offers is a hybrid between what was known as PNAgent or XenApp Services and the Web Interface, with the exception that applications cannot be launched directly from the pull-out menu. They must be either subscribed manually, or auto-subscribed by an administrator (with a simple KEYWORD:Auto tag being appended to the published application’s description in XenApp). Once this process is done, an end user is empowered by new application icons being written to their Start Menu and the Add/Remove Programs entry of Windows. It should and does feel like the user can just browse and add applications as if they’re shopping in a store.

One of the things that I really like is that by default the user is prompted to authenticate every time they visit either the online or desktop integrated store, or when they launch an app. This offers some degree of security in a shared desktop or kiosk environment, but can easily be overridden by saving the password entered as an access token. This token is exchanged with the Storefront so that even if the user logs out and back in again (maybe as a different user) their store based apps remain authenticated so that they can be launched by double-clicking an icon in their Start Menu. Once you have ‘purchased’ the apps from the store, they should remain functional until the token lifetime expires – which is around 6 months by default if I recall correctly.

Lessons learned during the installation:

1. Storefront will not be able to use an SSL certificate if you haven’t configured a certificate in IIS before beginning the install. Using Storefront without SSL causes problems as the Receiver client won’t connect to the store using HTTP unless you make an additional registry key setting. Uninstall, add a cert and reinstall if this is the case
2. When installing Storefront you are prompted to choose the location where subscription information will be saved. However in my case the option to detect an existing SQL Express 2008 R2 installation did not work – however choosing SQL Server and pointing to an instance called .\SQLExpress worked fine
3. If you’re integrating Merchandising Server 2.1 with Storefront you should make sure that the Store name mentioned on the Configuration tab of the delivery rule matches the actual Store name you configured in Storefront, otherwise it won’t connect.
4. When adding Access Gateway appliances into the list of trusted appliances to enable silent authentication you must make sure that you use the same hostname as is configured on the AG itself. If you have only entered a hostname on the gateway but configure a FQDN for the trusted appliance entry it won’t connect

Hopefully that’s just a little taster of what Storefront has to offer, there’s plenty more to learn and discover – but for the meantime I guess that the couple of pointers above may help someone out of trouble!

In terms of my initial foray in a lab environment it has not been straightforward. The terminology seems a little confusing, I mean a Streaming Server sounds different from a Management Server – and I didn’t realise at first that the Streaming Server is something which you could leave out entirely if you wished. All of the functionality is built in to the App-V management platform, so a Streaming Server is only appropriate if you’ve got clients running in a branch office.

The documentation flicks from one hyperlink to another in a bewildering fashion, but stick to the Prerequisites in order to get IIS and .Net application components installed successfully. You’ll need a database server installed before you start, I used SQL Server 2008 Express which was fine for my small lab.

Don’t forget that you can download the App-V group policy client ADM from here.

When connecting the App-V streaming client to your App-V centralised package server you may experience strange issues unless you use the fully qualified domain name within the host name field of the client.

Strangely – in a virtual environment the Application Virtualization Management Server service fails to start after boot. This can cause false starts if your clients can’t connect to the application services. More to follow on this one so check back again sometime soon..

DISM /online /Get-TargetEditions

once the possible editions are displayed, e.g. ServerEnterprise then enter:

DISM /online /Set-Edition:ServerEnterprise /ProductKey:XXXXXXX-XXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXX to upgrade to Enterprise edition.

The server will require a reboot, following which it will adopt the new version without requiring any software re-installation.

System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Through a process of elimination we found that she could log in elsewhere without issue, but it was only when she used this one published app on her non-primary screen that the problem occurred. She was using Windows 7, and so we resolved the problem by ticking the ‘use this screen as the primary’ tick box for the other screen. This swapped the location of her Start menu from the right hand to left hand screen, but solved the problem.

A colleague discovered in the end that this is a known issue with Citrix seamless published apps, discussed in the following Knowledge Base post http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1529108

operation failed with error 0x0000007e

Now, it’s important to explain that this doesn’t seem to occur with all printers – however it is consistent between computers, so if you have multiple servers connecting to the same share you should receive the same error on each.

So far I have experienced this problem with HP and Canon printers using the manufacturer’s latest x64 drivers, but it still seems that it must be driver related. Strangely, shared printers from different vendors (such as Kyocera or Ricoh) did not display the issue.

After a fair bit of searching the web for a solution I came across the following Microsoft hotfix knowledge base entry:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982728

Initially I failed to notice that there are three different versions, for x64, i386 and Itanium – so make sure that you expand the line fully which contains the checkbox for the item that will be downloaded.

Thankfully, after applying the hotfix and rebooting the error no longer appeared. This is a fundamental issue with Windows Server 2008 R2 and no doubt will affect many Citrix XenApp6 or Remote Desktop Services rollouts that connect to remote print shares.

To remove an email address from the list that has already been cached, to prevent it from being suggested again, open a new message and begin typing in the email address. Select the email address to be removed by using the up and down arrow keys. Once the email address to be removed is highlighted, hit the Delete key. If you would prefer to remove all cached email addresses, then the .nk2 file can be deleted, which is where Outlook stores them. The file is normally located in C:\Documents and Settings\[USERNAME]\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I’d rather be using Web Interface 5.2, but I don’t have the choice right now so I just wanted to find a way to butcher the old client download link instead of copying on and renaming the new client to ica32pkg.msi.

The answer lies within the server side inetpub/wwwroot/Citrix/MetaFrame/site/include/serverscripts/install.cs script where the base Win32 file name is specified:

ClientData[1,2] = LangCode + “/ica32/ica32pkg.msi”

This can easily be changed, and was successful when it read

ClientData[1,2] = LangCode + “/ica32/XenAppWeb.msi”

In the example below the name of the database (shown in SQL Enterprise Manager / Management Studio) is Website_Lists and so it’s very easy to search and replace for this tag so that each database you import can be done using the same SQL commands. The script restores the database from a file backup, but restores it to an alternate location (creating the database at the same time). It then redirects the internal references to the database’s transaction logs to a new location consistent with the new disk layout. In this case the backup files all contained references to the E: drive which wasn’t present in the new server.

restore database “Website_Lists”
FROM DISK=’L:\DB Backups\DDWebsite_Lists.bak’
WITH MOVE ‘Website_Lists_DATA’ TO
‘J:\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data\Website_Lists_DATA.mdf’,
MOVE ‘Website_Lists_LOG’ TO
‘K:\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data\Website_Lists_LOG.ldf’;

Connect to the server using SQL Management Studio, right click on the server name and select New Query. Copy/paste the text above and alter as appropriate.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315539