... faster and faster than ever.

Here's a small summary of my year 2008:

• Royal TS made some great progress: At the beginning of 2008 Royal TS 1.4.3 (2008-01-10) was the first remote desktop application (besides mstsc.exe, of course) to handle the /consol to /admin switch in XP SP3/Vista SP1 properly.
• Royal TS 1.5 (2008-06-15) was a release with BIG changes: BIGGEST CHANGE: THE BURGER IS GONE! Royal TS should be Royal, so the crown is the new icon for Royal TS.  Another big thing was the introduction of strong encryption with the document protection feature. Besides that, the UI was streamlined and some nice graphics were inserted (designed and composed by a good friend of mine, Armin - thanks again for that)
• The code4ward web page was relaunched using DotNetNuke.
• My internet connection became unstable, so I decided to host my server with my website in a real datacenter with a decent connection.
• One very new experience of 2008 was having no vacation. Yes, that's right, there was no summer vacation as usual.
• Ok, this one is not exactly a vacation but could be interpreted as one: In November I left Europe for the first time and spend 10 days in the U.S. - Seattle. I attended the Microsoft OpsMgr TAP meeting, met a lot of great guys, saw the Pacific, a Rainforest and ate a lot of Burgers - shopping wasn't bad either.
• We had some quiet holidays (which was nice) and I took some days off.
• Lastly a sad story: we had to put one of our cats, Phoebe, to sleep because of a fast growing tumor on her nose. She was only 5 years old. I wasn't really a cat person until I met my wife (and her cats), so I never thought that a creature like this can be so lovable. We all miss you, Phoebe!

What's up for 2009:

After almost 8 years as a freeware, Royal TS grew into a nice and popular product. There's a strong community, a lot of users with great ideas and so much to do. I decided to spend more time on Royal TS. So, from now on, Royal TS will be shareware and I am really excited about this. Your support will help me to improve and extend Royal TS even faster.

But fear not, Royal TS can still be used freely.

First of all, I will keep all previous versions of Royal TS (1.5.1 and earlier) available for free as before. The shareware license applies only to version 1.6.0 (and later).
Secondly, 1.6.0 can also be used for free if you don't need to handle more than 10 connections. So everyone using Royal TS for private use at home, can still use it for free.
Third: the license fee is fair: one license will be EUR 20,00 / USD 25,00 (prices may vary depending of the currency conversion).
Number four: when you buy a license you are entitled to upgrade to any version of Royal TS for a full year.

I'm looking forward to 2009 and hope you stay with Royal TS.

A healthy, successful and happy new year,

Stefan

As maybe many of you observed as well, the Remote Desktop components shipped with Vista and XP SP3 (especially XP!) are not as stable that the previous versions. My personal experience includes sudden disconnects (when heavy graphics in the remote sessions are involved) as well as "stuck" sessions. These sessions are stuck when you try to gracefully disconnect a remote session. Somehow - and don't ask me why - the remote desktop component thinks it must try to reconnect, which never happens. The nice reconnect screen has a disabled or useless "Cancel" button. So, the session is "stuck".

Only remedy (now): Shutdown Royal TS and restart it.

Royal TS get's a new menu item "Force Disconnect" to destroy the ActiveX control itself by force and should only be used in that rare occasion.

I got a lot of feedback lately, that Royal TS needs an import functionality. I completely agree, but I soon realized, that almost everyone has different requirements. So thinking through all possibilities and providing a powerful UI which can handle all different requirements would be very time consuming.

So I thought, providing a sample script which shows how this can be done should get you started...

Click here to get to the script.

A friend of mine just brought to my attention that Royal TS was mentioned in the November Issue of Windows IT Pro Magazine (on Page 9). Björn Lysell wrote:

"... I can recommend a freeware utility called Royal TS that you can use to group your connections in a simple GUI. You can read about and download Royal TS at the following URL: http://www.code4ward.net  ..."

I am very proud that a tool which was done late 2003 using dotnet Framework 1.1 is still very popular and useful - It's even running smoothly on Windows Vista.