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What Happens When You Close A Windows 2008 RemoteApp?

Saturday, 29 September 2007 by Michel Roth

When published applications were reasonable new, for a while there was the mystery of the published application postmortem. What happens to the application after it is closed by the user. The same will probably not be likely to happen with the introduction of seamless applications, RemoteApp, in Windows Server 2008. Why? Because the Terminal Services team has an excellent blog entry up explaining exactly how the whole process works.

Here's what it boils down to: there's basically two phases that a RemoteApp goes through when it is closed. The first phase is about Windows checking whether or not the RemoteApp, and child process (indirectly launched app from the RemoteApp) or a tray icon is running. If none of these processes are running Windows will disconnect the session by ending the mstsc.exe process.

Now the session is in a disconnected state. When will this session be ended you ask? Well, that's the weird part. Never. At least that's the case by default. Currently (in a fresh install of RC0) when a RemoteApp is disconnected, it is never ended. This is by design. This of course could eventually lead resource depletion on the Terminal Server. THis is why you need to configure a new Group Policy in Windows Server 2008 called "Set time limit for logoff of RemoteApp sessions". With this policy you can configure the time windows a disconnected sessions is allowed. Note that goes specifically for RemoteApps, not for a published desktop.

Any way, this is the short version. You should be sure to read the entire article at the Terminal Services Team blog.