Steve’s Blog

In part 1 of this series I set about creating a remote desktop plugin using Delphi. It didn’t do anything except initialize itself and display a few message boxes indicating its progress.  Not very useful.

In order for this whole thing to work the way I want it to, the plugin is going to have to interact with the user on the remote workstation.  This means displaying a form that will have to be on top of the remote desktop window.  I had some vague misgivings that remote desktop in full screen mode would be an “always on top” window that would interfere with the interaction that I need. So, as the next step in the process, I changed the plugin to create a form, make it an “always on top” window and display my status messages in a TMemo contained in the form.  Surprisingly enough this actually works quite well.

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I have recently found myself in a situation where I need to have an application running on a server using remote desktop interact with files and devices on the user’s local workstation.  Specifically, I need to be able to use a scanner to scan documents and / or retrieve files containing documents that have already been scanned. I found several commercial plugins that would drive the scanner but I couldn’t find anything that would allow me to interact with the user to allow her to import documents from a file.

Knowing that there are commercial plugins available, I know that it is possible to write a plugin for remote desktop.  So, I’m thinking; “How hard can it be?”.  Since we are virtually a pure Delphi shop I started looking for examples of Delphi plugins.  Surprisingly, I didn’t find any.  It is difficult to believe that no one else has done this, but I seem to be a pioneer. So, in this and the next few articles, I am going to create a remote desktop plugin using Delphi and remote desktop virtual channels and I am going to document the process here.

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