Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Services) Team Blog

so this means, WPF is still rendered on server?

@L

RDP 7 does make certain decisions on optimizing the protocol traffic based on the administrator / user choice specified in the Remote Desktop Connection -> Options -> Experience tab connection speed setting - this is to optimize performance for best user experience. However this does not include deciding whether to do client-side or host-side rendering, this decision is based on content type as described in this article.

@hannespreishuber

WPF - yes, rendered on the server.

@David Rottenberg

Thanks for the feedback David. What applications are being used by your customer? The client-based rendering was provided in pre-release versions of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 only for brand new written applications that use the new DirectX 10.1 / DXGI 1.1 API introduced in Windows 7. All existing DirectX applications would anyway go through host-based rendering. Please test the latest available versions of Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 for your customer's DirectX applications - there are many enhancements in RDP 7 for performance, scale, and user experience that are applicable to even host-rendered applications.

Thanks for the information on the application. The only way to measure the scale of a deployment is to actually test it with the latest available version of Windows Server 2008 R2 - I will encourage you to try the application on a Remote Desktop Session Host.

As for running DirectX applications on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V virtual machines, there will be the GPU offload hardware assist Calista technologies at some point in the future: http://blogs.msdn.com/rds/archive/tags/Calista/default.aspx

Would it be possible to make this an advanced option for those who would like to opt in (at the expense of robustness, which could be tested in their particular case)?  I think this would be the best decision..

I have to agree with some others yanking this at the last minute is not cool and not going to win you any fans, many were looking forward to this.

while I understand the majority can get by without it use cases remain where this is preferred or needed, or already started to be counted on.  As Nik mentioned keeping it in there as an experimental technically unsupported option enabled by a regkey would seem to me like the better option if technically possible.

A better design is to provide options that can be changed or customized by users or admin.

For example DirectX 10.1->client-rendering, GDI-> host rendering, Direct2D->client rendering, etc. And the option can be changed from Advanced RDP7 options(Warning: Ignored if you connect to < Windows Server 2008 R2 )

By changing the options users or admin can scale the application or server resources itself.

Also users can use either thin or thick client.

So this proposed design will satisfies all type of users. To implement this design is not very painful for you MS. Since you already do some part of it.

Please do it at least in next service pack of Windows Server 2008/ Windows 7.

by

A well wisher

I'm completely with the rest of the comments. this is a terrible idea not to just make it an option and decrease the investment in client rendering features (regardless of the callista acquisition). distributed computing (including graphics) are only going to become more powerful over time, not less and the move to a centralized model is just backwards.

why would microsoft want to spark a relegious debate here? just do both.  $61B in sales should buy the ability to develop more than one feature and i agree with the comment that this will provide yet another feature to push people off of XP and onto Windows 7 (presumably the most important thing Microft could be thinking about right now for increased share-holder value)

Holy Wild Frozen Cow !!

This is terribly stupid.

terrible idea... Guess we have to wait for win8 to include that feature... Hate 7 being stripped down to less features more and more...

Like said before, this is terribly STUPID.

We built a whole business case on this single feature alone because we control the software and we're able to build against DirectX 10.1 with remoting.

We're heading to the cloud, we need to run those app instances in the cloud but we definitely need to lower power consumption on the server side by avoiding to put 3D cards in every server chassis.

Your host-side enhanced bitmap acceleration capabilities can't even support 10 simultaneous clients.

you really didn't realize the consequence of this choice, we would have deployed R2 on thousands of nodes, now we're going to cancel the project.

"This decision was made based on the feedback" ?

Which feedback ? 'cause the only feedback i can see here is : DO IT !

Even if it's a dirty reg switch, give us the choice !

15 years in the field advocating your products, Microsoft, i'm really disappointed.

Gaurav, in the scenario of high resolution and high fps data, the preferred solution would come down to bandwidth comsumption to minimize a lag in video output to the client.

Im assuming bandwidth that by streaming the rendering to the client is less bandwidth intensive than sending 1920x1080 bitmap data compressed (lossless compression?) at 30-60fps to the client.

An an outsider, I can see some really cool idea's come from this, just as VM's have taken off.  Game companies offering Games on demand (ie. no download), that are always updated because their on the cloud and protection against piracy.  Of course, latency and bandwidth are the two key problems in this scenario, but Im assuming your dismissing an opportunity to reduce bandwidth consumption and offload cpu/gpu cycles to the client by your decision.

Absolutely Ridiculous MICROSOFT... why tease it in RC and Yank it out in RTM..make no sense at all...  Very Disappointed!!  

This lost Microsoft a complete conversion for us.  250 Windows 7 clients and 30 servers.

Thanks to the constant feature pull, the decision has been made to stay with 2K3 and XP, all now served entirely as VDI, and considered "legacy applications."  

$250,000 that would have gone to getting our suppliers to port their apps properly to Win 7 has now been reinvested to porting those same apps (supported) to RHEL 5.  All desktops are undergoing conversion to RHEL as we speak, and we estimate that within 3 years we will have been able to abandon MS all together.  

This is entirely due to the decision to pull client-side rendering of DirectX 10.1, a feature we had been counting on to support several future projects in-house.  Instead, it will all be recoded for X11.  (Go go X11 forwarding.)

So thank you.  Thank you a great deal.  After 10 long years of lobbying, your decisions to pull this feature, (oh, and the Ribbon Bar, that also won no friends,) enabled me to finally convince my workplace to abandon Microsoft.  Microsoft's project managers truely must be the strongest supporters of open source alive.