The public beta is ready! RD Tabs 2.0.4 (public beta) can be downloaded here...

UPDATE: LINK NO LONGER AVAILABLE

Please do not distribute this version. It is not ready for prime-time yet! Enjoy. Post comments below on what you think of it. Please send error reports and also post below if you find any bugs.

Hi Timothy

Firstly thank you VERY much for making this great tool available free and for all your time and effort. This is a work of Genius!

Firstly I love all the new connection options that have been enabled, especially the ability to select which drives to connect. The new tabs are great and the option to detach a tab is worth a million dollars!

The only real complaint is that the installer wiped out my previous install of RD Tabs, even though I had installed it in a different location so I have lost all my favourites.

Other than that, I am looking forward to trying out all the new features. Thank you once again for your help and I'll give more feedback when I can.

Wow, your favorites should NOT have been wiped out! I wonder how that happened. RD Tabs 2.0 beta will uninstall 1.x before installing, but the favorites should remain right where they are. It worked on all my test boxes. I wonder what is unique about your environment... Are you using a roaming profile? What version of Windows are you running? Try looking in your %appdata% folder (check both roaming and local locations, just in case), then "Avian Waves" folder, then "RD Tabs" (followed by a bunch of random characters) then look for the old version (whatever it was) then look for a config file. It's just XML so you can view it in IE or notepad or whatever. If you see your old favorites in there, then you can copy this file over the NEWER version of RD Tabs (2.0.x). You will lose any changes you made after you upgraded, but you should restore your favorites. Let me know if this helps.

Thanks for the compliments! I appreciate it. Spread the word! RD Tabs is now the ultimate remote desktop client!

Just a note that RD Tabs 2.0.5 will be released later this week - still public beta. I discovered two HUGE bugs thanks to the testers and submitted error reports!!!

Here's the changelog so far (it's likely to grow before 2.0.5 is out):

- Fixed a bug in RD Tabs' message pump hooks which were causing certain remote desktop user interface "lags." This was most noticable when you would try to "click and drag" a window by its title bar in a remote session. Sometimes you had to hover the mouse cursor over the titlebar for a second or two before the click would register. This was due to a bug which was causing a remote session which was already in focus to still receive "set focus" events repeatedly each time a mouse click event occurred. Essentially what was happening was the remote desktop couldn't respond to the mouse event quickly because of the the lag introduced by RD Tabs interrupting and repeatedly setting focus. This has been fixed. Just FYI, this error only affects 2.0 because of the advanced nature with which 2.0 examines the Windows message pump for a more consistent user interface. (On their own, the remote sessions have very poor notification systems for mouse/keyboard events).

- Fixed a bug where detaching and reattaching (floating and unfloating) a tab with an active session could crash RD Tabs due to issues tracking clean-up events during the transition from docked to floating or vice versa.

Hi Timothy

Yes, we use roaming profiles. Here is my setup:

Windows XP SP2
Domain Member
User with full local admin rights


Steps taken during install
- Saved install File
- Closed all sessions and exited RD Tabs
- Ran new installer
- Accepted License and when prompted for path, set it to -> C:\Program Files\Avian Waves\RD Tabs Beta (I expected this would do a new install but seems not)
- Completed the install and noticed that folder C:\Program Files\Avian Waves\RD Tabs had been completely deleted. RD Tabs started correctly, but it didn't have any of my favourites.

Thanks to your suggestions, I have found a user.config in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Avian_Waves\RDTabs.exe_Url_lcg2nkdzjthvbnmpscifxclv1gvbavxr\1.1.4.0

But seeing as I only had a few favourites that I regularly used, I am not too fussed about restoring them. Plus I've now configured my options and would rather keep them than the old favourites.

I did notice the lag a bit, but I thought it was because of the colours as it was much more acceptable at 15bit. I am looking forward to the next release.

Hi Timonthy

Unfortunately you don't have a forum for bug reports, and seeing as this is beta anyway, I hope this is the appropriate place to give info.

Firstly, regarding the favourites, I ran the installer at home without changing the paths and I still had my favourites, so it seems your installer doesn't like it if you change the path.

I have come across a bug. With the previous version of RD Tabs, I could select to share drives. When I did this, I could copy a file from the remote session and paste on my computer and vice versa. This beta version lets me share drives but when I try to paste locally I get an error. I have taken a screen shot but can't see how to upload it. I can email it to you if you like. At this point, your screen capture button doesn't work and after several attempts, it crashes RD Tabs. I submitted the error report when requested.

To make sure it wasn't a server or Remote Desktop error, I closed RD Tabs and connected using Remote Desktop (The latest version) and it let me copy and paste fine.

Another suggestion, on the select drives form, it would be great if you have a select all/none button as by default all is ticked, but I have like 10 mapped drives which I don't want to share. This isn't critical but would be convenient as it's still possible to still select all listed drives then press space or click a tick box to clear it etc.

I tried the beta and found one annoying problem: All key combinations with "Alt Gr", the ALT on the right side of the space key, don't work. I first noticed that when I tried to type the \ on a german keyboard layout - you need the Alt Gr key for that on the german layout. However it doesn't work for the "€" and the "@" as well.

Krash_control - "RD Tabs Support" is where I figured bug reports would go, but you are right in that with the beta release, this thread is a great place to put the error report. Thanks for the detailed listing of issues you have supplied! I appreciate the rigorous testing. Here are some answers...

To copy files from the remote desktop to your local computer using "cut n' paste" you MUST share both the Disk Drives AND Clipboard. The same is true (I believe) for the Microsoft client. The reason is because the local clipboard has no sense of the file that is being copied remotely unless you share your clipboard and operate under both sessions using the single shared clipboard. Conversely, if you do not have "shared drives" enabled, files cannot be copied over the clipboard because (I'm guessing) there's no way to access the file remotely since files don't sit on the clipboard itself, just references to their location. RD Tabs 1.x used the RDP 5.2 methodology where the clipboard was always shared, so to copy a file through the clipboard, you only needed to share the disk drives. RDP 6.0 offers more granular security granting you the ability to turn off clipboard sharing.

That being said, I have run into servers in the past that generated really strange errors doing a clipboard file copy, but it was not unique to RD Tabs. It appears to be some other issue. I have not investigated it deep enough to find the root cause. I do know the error message is something like "Windows cannot find '%1!|s!'." Is that the error you are getting?

Changing the path on the installer must generate a different hash/GUID for the %appdata% folder to use (the big long "RD Tabs_FASFDSAFDSAFSADFASD" crap. I'm not sure. I'm using Microsoft's .Net "My Settings" API for that stuff. I bet that's the cause. .Net probably thought it was a different app, since it was in a different folder, so it created a brand new user.config.

You are right in that there is no way to run RTM and beta versions of RD Tabs simultaneously. I apologize for this. I should have made that more clear. The installer will always uninstall older versions.

I got your screen capture error report and created a fix in 2.0.5. Well, it's not so much a fix as a work-around. It's due to a known issue in the .Net Framework clipboard API I'm using (again, supplied by Microsoft). If the clipboard is innaccessible for any reason (there are dozens of possible causes) it will generate an exception. RD Tabs now handles this exception and notifies you if the clipboard is busy instead of crashing. Thanks for the report!! In the future I'll probably add the option to save the screen capture directly to disk as an alternative to the clipboard.

Select All/None is a great idea! I'll add that into 2.0.6 since it is super-easy to implement.

Please feel free to start new posts or continue this thread if you have any more issues! Thanks for your diligent testing!

Marc - Thanks for the note. This is due to the new "System Key Shortcuts" feature in RD Tabs (an accessibility feature) where a modifier key can be used to "escape" from the remote desktop's focus and perform shortcut options. (Read the changelogs and in the Options menu for more details until the help file is up to date.) I did not realize the importance of AltGr in the German keyboard layout! I will switch the default System Key back to "Right Control" which it was originally before version 2.0.4, so future international users don't suffer the same problem. Is "Right Control" a choice that doesn't interfere as much, Marc?

Either way, you can go into Options, then System Key Shortcuts and change the "First key stroke..." to whatever you like, or you can disable System Key Shortcuts all together and there will be no keyboard shortcut for escaping out of the remote session (same as in RD Tabs 1.x).

Ok. I turned that feature off - with the result that after I pressed the altgr key, really strange things happend. Like I wasn't able to type any character anymore and the escape key cycled through the open windows. The \ worked though. 🙂 It's like it still thinks alt gr is pressed even though its released or something - and even though the sys key feature is turned off. Alt Gr is a strange key anyways. Somehow Alt + Ctrl but somehow still different. However, I figured out that enabling the sys key feature, switching the syskey from altgr to right ctrl and then disabling it again works. Strange behaviour gone. I used 2.0.5 for this.

Right now I don't think that I use the right control key at all. So I think fot the german keyboard layout the key is probably ok - unless someone installed another tool in parallel that uses that key as well as some hotkey 😉

2.0.6 is going to be released later today or possibly tomorrow. The bug reports have declined sharply, so consider 2.0.6 beta the first "release candidate." Depending on how many bug reports I get after its release, RD Tabs 2.0 may soon go RTM.

Here's the 2.0.6 changelog so far...

- Fixed a bug where there was about two pixels of "invalid" drop space between each tab when you were dragging and dropping tabs. Now the transition is seemless.

- Fixed a bug where RD Tabs allowed you to "drop" a tab onto the "add new tab" button or tab title scrolling buttons and then the tab would be dropped into a confusing position for the user. Basically now it just puts the invalid drop icon on the screen instead. You can still hover over the title bar scrolling buttons to scroll while you are dragging.

- Fixed a bug where when the tab title bar was scrolling towards the end (scrolling right) it would sometimes not complete the scroll and would end up being just one pixel shy of a location where you could drag and drop a tab so that it would be located at the end of the all the open tabs in the pane.

- Added a new utility: the RD Tabs Profile Clean-up Utility. You can access it from the Tools menu, or by executing "rdprofclean.exe" from the RD Tabs application folder. This tool allows you to view all user.config files for all versions of RD Tabs for your user account on the computer you are currently logged onto. You can now easily dispose of pre-2.0 profiles which may contain unencrypted passwords, etc. I still HIGHLY recommend using EFS ontop of RD Tabs' built-in password encryption, for maximum security!

- Changed the default "first system key stroke" back to the Right Control key again. The reason is that although Right (Green) Alt is great for Americans like me, in other keyboard layouts AltGr is used as often as shift is for us yanks! 🙂 Sorry about that to all my international users. Didn't mean to catch you off-gaurd. All new users will not experience the interruption. Current users need to MANUALLY set the keystroke to something other than right alt (AltGr) in the options under System Key Shortcuts.

- Additionally, to avoid further confusion, System Key Shortcuts are DISABLED by default. It is more of a "power user" feature (I LOVE IT) and I don't want people turned off by RD Tabs because it's acting unresponsive. Again, current testers will have to disable it manually. This is just a default setting change.

- Added new buttons (link labels) in the "Select Drives" and "Select Devices" redirection options. You can now "Select All" or "Select None" which will hopefully make it a little easier to select the target drives/devices you want.

- If the microsoft remote desktop DLL disappears from RD Tabs' folder (which can happen apparently if you uninstall, reinstall, uninstall, reinstall many times in a row without rebooting after it recommends rebooting) RD Tabs will now catch this and tell you that a simple repair operation on the installation will fix the problem, instead of generating an error report.

If I am connected to a pc, then the connection drops and it starts counting to reconnect and the 5th attempt is succesfull, then, if the connection drops again after an hour, it starts counting from 5. Maybe it should reset the counter to 0 after a connection worked without a problem for a few minutes.

This is just my personal opinion to the new tabs: They look better, but the add new tab button at the right was more intuitive I think. The button was where the new tab would appear.

I've got another idea which I got when using virtual pc lately. Surprinsingly, it is possible to resize the desktop of a windows guest inside virtual pc by resizing the surrounding window of virtual pc on the host. So the area inside the virtual pc window is always filled completly with the guest os desktop; no borders and no scrolling. It would be cool if that's be possible with rdp as well.

Marc-

The counter not getting reset is a bug! Thanks for pointing it out. This will make its way into 2.0.7. After each successful connection (no matter how much time has passed), the counter should reset.

As for the new add button, I agree. I hate the plus button. 🙂 However, it is 10x easier to code than a faux tab that acts as an add button. I had to write the new tab code from scratch, so that was just something I scrapped because it looked like it would take longer than it is worth for the initial 2.0 release. Do expect to see a return of the faux tab adder, however. I will add that. It just didn't seem like a priority with all the dozens of new features to work on. Making a little box on the left-hand side was super easy, in contrast. In the future it will be a configurable option: you will be able to have the "always on the screen" add button on the left (as in 2.0), or the faux tab add button (as in 1.0). The context menu options will carry to the faux tab as well, so functionality will not be reduced when it makes its grand reappearance. Thanks for the suggestion.

I agree that dynamic resizing would be a really cool feature. And I know the RDP protocol itself supports it as there are clients (all of which I've seen do NOT make use of the Microsoft RDP COM library / ActiveX control) that do this already. Most notably: the new beta RDP client for Macs written by Microsoft!!! Now, the problem is I cannot find any code to do this in the library and I've looked really hard. There is even an event you can listen to be notified when the desktop changes resolutions (and although it is untested, RD Tabs should respond appropriately to this event by resizing the inner client control), but I can't find any way to actually invoke this event or cause a dragging/resized window to invoke a desktop resize. The closest functionality I can find for this is to put your username/password in the rd tabs connection properties dialog, then when you want to resize your desktop, hit the disconnect button, then the reconnect button. Lame workaround, but it does work. If I ever find a way to dynamically resize the desktop, you can be assured it will find its way into RD Tabs. As an aside, the Microsoft client (for Windows, not Mac) does NOT support this feature. Since RD Tabs uses the same technology, it likely won't appear until the MS one does it. The MS COM library doesn't even support TS Gateway yet, so don't hold your breath!

Interesting. Then it's hoepfully included in the next version of the tsclient for windows.

The closest functionality I can find for this is to put your username/password in the rd tabs connection properties dialog, then when you want to resize your desktop, hit the disconnect button, then the reconnect button. Lame workaround, but it does work.

It doesn't. 😛 If I connect to some host in a large rdtabs 2.0.6 window, then resize the rdtabs windows, the scrollbars appear. Pressing disconenct and reconnect, the scrollbars are still tehre afterwards. It's like a tab remembers it's previous size. But I think this worked in an erlier version, but maybe pre 2.0.

The closest functionality I can find for this is to put your username/password in the rd tabs connection properties dialog, then when you want to resize your desktop, hit the disconnect button, then the reconnect button. Lame workaround, but it does work.

It doesn't. 😛 If I connect to some host in a large rdtabs 2.0.6 window, then resize the rdtabs windows, the scrollbars appear. Pressing disconenct and reconnect, the scrollbars are still tehre afterwards. It's like a tab remembers it's previous size. But I think this worked in an erlier version, but maybe pre 2.0.

Really? I just tried it and have no problems. Which display mode are you using: Fit to application window? Fit to tab pane? or Custom?

What version is the server you are connecting to (Win2000 and/or NT may not support this, but 2003 certainly does)?

The only real complaint is that the installer wiped out my previous install of RD Tabs, even though I had installed it in a different location so I have lost all my favourites.

It's against the license agreement to install more than one RDTabs on your PC anyways ...

The closest functionality I can find for this is to put your username/password in the rd tabs connection properties dialog, then when you want to resize your desktop, hit the disconnect button, then the reconnect button. Lame workaround, but it does work.

It doesn't. 😛 If I connect to some host in a large rdtabs 2.0.6 window, then resize the rdtabs windows, the scrollbars appear. Pressing disconenct and reconnect, the scrollbars are still tehre afterwards. It's like a tab remembers it's previous size. But I think this worked in an erlier version, but maybe pre 2.0.

Really? I just tried it and have no problems. Which display mode are you using: Fit to application window? Fit to tab pane? or Custom?

What version is the server you are connecting to (Win2000 and/or NT may not support this, but 2003 certainly does)?

Display Mode? hmm. I just installed rdtabs. Then I start it, maximize the window and connect somewhere. For this effekt to happen, I transform the window from maximized to normal, then disconnect und reconnect. I use the combobox/pulldown menu on the left side for disconnect & reconnect. Note that it scales correctly if I click on the connect dialog in the middle of the screen after being disconnected. Only using the pulldown menu reconnect and the small button on the upper right lead to this effect.
The servers are win2003 servers and winxp's. I was able to reproduce it on multiple servers - I didn't try all but every one I tried, I had this effect.

If it's against the license agreement to have more than one RD Tabs installed, then that was unintentional wording. 🙂 The real reason is that it gets tricky to count COM dependencies if I let any number of RD Tabs register the same library in different installation folders. So it's really a technical limitation. 🙂 I apologize to the beta testers for the inconvenience!

Marc - I was finally able to replicate your problem! In order for it to be buggy, you have to "auto logon" by supplying credentials in the username/password fields. In my domain at work (where I was testing) that was disabled for security reasons -- essentially so that somebody can't sit down at your PC and log on remotely to a computer without knowing your password, even if you've saved it. Once I tested it at home where I don't have that policy enabled, I was able to see what you are talking about.

In the connection properties, under the "Display" tab in the "Screen Size" group, there's three options. One is "fit to application window" which will always fill up the entire window, even if the window is split into multiple tab panes. The purpose being that you get a full desktop even if you are regularly dragging tabs around from pane to pane. The second option is "fit to tab pane" which just sizes the desktop to whatever size the tab pane is. The third is custom which is pretty self explanatory.

Okay, so in "fit to application window" I had to create a new event to query the current size of the application window. The problem is that this event is not firing when you click "reconnect" because it's mistakenly assuming the window size is the same (assumes this because it remembers all the other properties and I just didn't think to make this exception). This is a bug. Thanks for finding it! "Fit to tab pane" is a work-around unless you are regularly doing split-screen operations which might be annoying because it will fit the to pane instead of the full application window.

2.0.7 will have a fix for this issue!

Thanks, Marc! You are like the golden beta tester finding all these strange bugs!