Archive for September 13th, 2006

Citrix and hardware

Wednesday, September 13th, 2006

Don’t expect me to talk about Netscaler stuff. I’m a Windows guy. It’s started in 1989 when I got PS/2 with 2Mb of memory on board and Windows 2.x as a GUI appliance to an IBM thermal printer. And then suddenly Windows 3.0 appeared and I didn’t have a clue about programming on it (I was an MS DOS guy). Thanks to BBS (some of you probably have never heard about it - it was mini Internet at that time) I got a text file - that wonderful book “Programming Windows” 1st edition written by Charles Petzold and read it twice and being facinated by Windows GUI independence from hardware went straight programming Norton Commander variant. Enough nostalgia. Let’s come back to Citrix and hardware.

I’m a big fan of OSR. Read their articles and bought some hardware from them to learn about USB driver programming, like this one:

 

This is a real USB device! You connect it via cable to your USB port and you have a button, switches and indicators. Inspired by this device I’m writing a driver which will monitor the health of a Citrix server by lighting appropiate indicators when your IMA service is gone, showing the number of sessions active, etc. And there is a button which could force a server to show a blue screen (in another words force a system dump to do an analysis later - that’s my job in Citrix) if things go beyond control of a Citrix administrator. Something like a magic to me. Stay tuned. 

- Dmitry Vostokov -

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Spying window messages: MessageHistory

Wednesday, September 13th, 2006

Finally Citrix has got its own troubleshooting tool for capturing window messages. It is similar to what SPY++ does but more easy to use especially in a customer environment. Existing tools are useful for developers focusing on specific product where they know its internals or in the process of debugging. Customers and technical support need something different. From my experience, existing tools require too much effort for a customer who sees and tries to use them for the first time. On the other hand technical support needs good traces where nothing has been left out. So I sat down at my 64-bit workstation and spent weekend to develop this lightweight tool to let customers do minimum and record everything and thus avoid usual turnaround in technical support cases requiring capturing messages and at the same time simplify trace analysis (at least for myself). 

While developing this tool I discovered its major feature: ability to capture all messages from 64-bit applications (in addition to messages from 32-bit applications). All existing tools I could find capture messages from 32-bit application only.

You can download MessageHistory for free from Citrix support web site (requires free registration):

MessageHistory

Check out also Citrix WindowHistory for 32-bit and WindowHistory for 64-bit platforms.

Currently I’m developing a presentation/class: “Understanding windows and messages: peering inside Citrix troubleshooting tools and their log files (WindowHistory and MessageHistory)”

Further plans are to develop more tools to track the history of various system events (in addition to windows and messages) and finally develop a toolbar to integrate all of them. 

- Dmitry Vostokov -

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