Terminal Servers and Remote Desktops

[abhijit]

Hi Folks,
How many of you are still working on shared client server applications. Instead of packaging, these are usually deployed to a terminal server environment, where they are accessed through Citrix or a remote desktop.

Both of these environments are really painful especially for development. For distribution stand point, they are super effecient and great. What are your views on them?

Cheers,
Abhijit

[szlamany]

I've got a customer that has an application server and all thin-clients and I gotta say that is a great way to manage an IT environment.

And it has no bearing on development or push out of my code at all.

Why do you say they are painful?

[abhijit]

one of the reasons is I do all my development through a terminal server env. thats where my vb ide sits. have you tried debugging in this fashion? there are a number of times that the debugger crashes the ide.

secondly, the env always seems to be running out of diskspace. that causes minor irritation to everybody around and we can't log in into the terminal server.

thirdly, there are a number of other development environments running in parallel on the same ts. that slows down things considerably.

[szlamany]

I would not want to develop in that environment - I did not understand what you meant...

I like a nice local C: drive with my own high-power workstations or laptop for that stuff!

[abhijit]

Exactly. I was referring specifically to developer woes. The distribution part is fine. Its the development thats giving me ulcers.

[abhijit]

One more issue with remote-desktop. If you press CTRL + W to close the browser window inside the desktop, it closes the remote desktop instead

[szlamany]

One more issue with remote-desktop. If you press CTRL + W to close the browser window inside the desktop, it closes the remote desktop instead

You know what they say - then don't press that button

I personally like RDP very much - used it extensively over the past 5 years to connect to client machines. Starting to use it less now that VPN is taking over...

Compared to the other tools - VNC, remote-this, pc-anywho - RDP is at least "real".