Default state of “active” applications October 29, 2009

Noticed something the other day that got me stumped for a while.

When adding an application in MDT 2010, you can create the application using the MDT 2010 Management Console, or you can use powershell as a programming interface.

For a while now I had been using the following command in powershell to create applications (example single line):

import-MDTApplication
-path 'DS001:\Applications'
-ShortName 'MacroMedia'
-Name 'Adobe Macromedia Flash Player 10'
-CommandLine 'flash_player_ax.exe /S'
-WorkingDirectory '.\Applications\MacroMedia'
-DestinationFolder 'MacroMedia'
-ApplicationSourcePath '$LocalPath\Sources'

However, I noticed that although my applications were appearing correctly in the Client Deployment Wizard, and installing correctly by ZTIApplications.wsf, they were not being copied from one Deployment point to another by the MDT Management Console (in my case a Media Deployment Point).

After some experimentation, I discovered that none of my applications added from my powershell scripts were “enabled” in the MDT Management Console. This was blocking the copies.

A simple addition to my scripts the explicit use of -enable “True”, fixed everything.

import-MDTApplication
-path 'DS001:\Applications'
-ShortName 'MacroMedia'
-Name 'Adobe Macromedia Flash Player 10'
-CommandLine 'flash_player_ax.exe /S'
-WorkingDirectory '.\Applications\MacroMedia'
-DestinationFolder 'MacroMedia'
-ApplicationSourcePath '$LocalPath\Sources'
-enable 'True'

It appears that the client scripts and the server scripts have different interpretations of what the default of “enable” should be if the element is not present in the applications.xml file.

Luckily for me, it’s an easy fix/work around to my powershell scripts.

Keith