A colleague of mine provided a wonderful description to a co-worker about what App-V from Microsoft is. I thought I would share that explanation with everybody else.
The product is called App-V (which was called SoftGrid before Microsoft bought it). It is similar to VMware ThinApp (formerly Thinstall).
App-V allows applications to run on a workstation without being installed in the traditional sense. The application lives inside a bubble. While the application can read everything on the system (files, registry, ODBC connections), when it tries to write to these locations the bubble uses a shim to intercept those calls and only make the changes inside the bubble. The application sees a merged view of the virtualized changes and the actual system data.
It’s like laying a transparency down over the file system and registry. The application can make changes to the transparency, but not the underlying data. However, as the application reads from the transparency, it can’t tell the difference.
If the application ends up broken, all you have to do is delete the changes cached in the bubble (give it a clean transparency), and it is restored to its default state. Also, since the applications have their own discreet bubbles, you can run software side-by-side that would normally conflict (like both Office 2003 and Office 2010 on the same system at the same time).
Technical Overview:
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