Project North Star Side-by-Side

SxS is a relatively new OS feature supported by Windows on XP, Windows 2003, and Vista. SxS is a must�?have feature in order to deploy most modern software products such as Microsoft Office 2007, Adobe Reader 8, and .NET 2.0/3.0. VMware Project North Star (Thinstall) is the only application virtualization solution which supports SxS. In the early days Microsoft recommend installing DLLs to c:\windows\system32 if you wanted to share them with other applications. This lead to “DLL Hell�? since one applications installer would install one version of a DLL and another installer would install another version overwriting the existing DLL. If the new version of the DLL wasn’t compatible the older application would suddenly break and stop working. This is still how the majority of applications install their DLLs, even Office 2007 installs approximately 7 DLLs to c:\windows\system32. Slowly the industry is moving to deploy shared DLLs using SxS as XP becomes mainstream and Visual Studio 2005 forces this on you if you want to use the Version 8 C Runtime libraries. With SxS technology, applications can install DLLs to version specific directories tell Windows what version of the DLL should be used when they load a DLL by that name. VMware is proud to announce the VMware Project North Star Beta (Thinstall). New features at general availability (GA) will include dynamic linking between "virtual packages" (Application Link) and over the wire updates via HTTP/HTTPS to update deployed virtual applications (Application Sync). Download the VMware Project North Star Beta (Thinstall) today.