Other Guidelines for Terminal Server Developers

[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]

When you are developing applications to run in a Windows®-based Terminal Server environment, follow these guidelines:

• Lock files and databases while making changes to prevent other users from make simultaneous changes to the same data.
• Check your application for memory leaks and resolve any problems. Of course this is good advice for any application, but in a Terminal Server environment an application can be run multiple times by multiple users, thus rapidly magnifying the effect of a memory leak.
• Use the MFC library whenever possible. The MFC library has a long list of tried-and-true classes for performing a wide variety of tasks. Most of these classes work well in the Terminal Server environment—usually much better than re-engineered solutions. A good example is the class that provides context-sensitive help text—help text that appears on-screen when the mouse pointer hovers over a button or menu item. If an application uses the MFC implementation to provide this feature, it will work reasonably well on the desktop system. But if the application implements this feature using dialog boxes or an alternate approach, the final result might not function well in the Terminal Server environment.