Virtual Applications in Windows 7 Virtual PC

Recently, I inadvertently discovered a useful feature of Windows 7 Virtual PC that I'd like to share, just in case there are folks out there who haven't experienced this particular functionality.

On my host laptop (a Windows 7 box), I've installed SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, although my previous XP box hosted SQL Server/Visual Studio 2005. I use Visio for Enterprise Architects as my data modeling tool and as I discovered during the move to the new Windows 7 laptop, Visio for Enterprise Architects requires Visual Studio 2005 in order to install properly - it won't play with VS2008.

Okay, fine.

This was annoying, but not catastrophic. Since most of our clients are still on SQL Server 2005, I have a Virtual PC with SQL Server/Visual Studio 2005 installed. I installed Visio on this VPC, grumbling since I knew I'd have to launch this VPC whenever I wanted to do any data modeling.

Or so I thought.

One day, I experienced a momentary lapse of consciousness and double-clicked a Visio (.vsd) file on my host machine. Just as I was cursing myself for doing something so dopey, the Virtual PC credentials login for my SQL Server/VS2005 VPC popped up. I entered my credentials, and the VPC started to launch, except instead of opening the VPC window, it launched Visio as a "virtual application" within the context of the host machine.

How cool is that?

I was able to access files from inside the VPC as well as the host machine from the Visio application menus.  The host machine treated it as a remote connection to the VPC through the local network.

I've poked around with this a little more since the first time it surprised me and have discovered a few more things:

• My VPC is a member of a domain.  If no network is available (even a network that is not the domain network), the remote application cannot launch.  For instance, I was in an airport recently with no internet/network connectivity and was unable to start the virtual application.
• For this domain-enabled VPC, it doesn’t seem to matter if Integration Features are enabled or not.  The remote application can still launch.
• Occasionally, Internet Explorer tries to take over and pretend that it’s the application of choice to host .vsd file.  You have to take a firm stand on this – right click the .vsd file and choose Open With.  On my host laptop, the option to open with the remote Visio program appears in the popup menu (SQLServer2005 is the name of my VPC):

I haven’t tried this with a VPC that isn’t a member of a domain, so I’m not sure what the behavior for that would be like.  I’ll have to give that a try for the next blog post!