Royal TS 2.2 for Windows introduces many new things and some cool stuff. We’re still working on the beta releases which are far from feature complete but we wanted to provide access to those early builds as soon as possible to give you a chance to test the new stuff and provide feedback.

Under the hood, Royal TS 2.2 changed significantly. We’ve rewritten the core of Royal TS to support a plugin based architecture, very much like Royal TSX for OS X. The plugin framework used in Royal TS is still not available for the public, plugins are shipped “integrated” and not separately, but it’s a huge step forward which allows us to:

• implement new connection types much faster and easier
• provide multiple implementations for the same connection type (pretty much the same as Royal TSX)
• continue to work on a true SDK/3rd party API which enables users and partners to implement plugins (this is on the roadmap for V3)

This build (11122) includes a new, very generic connection type to “integrate” external applications (such as MMC consoles or other applications) and the VNC connection type. The latter is handled by two different plugins and you can choose which one to use, globally or on a per connection level.

How does it all work?

Lets go ahead and just create a new VNC connection:

Note that the screenshot also shows the VNC default settings which can be configured as usual for all new connections.

Create a new VNC connection by providing a display name and a computer name:

You may also configure some advanced settings, such as encoding, compression, etc.:

Note, that there’s a new property page called “Active Plugin”:

This page works the same way as on Royal TSX or as you also may know from the dashboard settings. When the checkbox “Use the application default setting” is checked, Royal TS will look for the application default plugin and will use the application default plugin to establish the connection.

If unchecked, you can specify which plugin Royal TS should use for the connection. This way, you can create VNC connections using TightVNC while, at the same time other VNC connections are using UltraVNC. This concept also applies later on when we release a putty based terminal connection (stay tuned!).

Click on the button “Open Plugin Management” to view all registered plugins:

As you can see, not only connection types can be extended using plugins. We also plan to release addtional tasks in upcoming versions.

If you click on the VNC connection type, you will see that there are currently two plugins registered and the UltraVNC plugin is the application default plugin. You can use this dialog to change the application default plugin for VNC connections and also open plugin specific settings:

Since these plugins require you to install the viewer application locally, you can use this dialog to configure the path to the viewer application.

If you do not configure the viewer application, Royal TS will try to locate the executable automatically the first time it is using the plugin to connect and if Royal TS cannot find the viewer application, you will be asked to provide the path to the application.

That’s all to share at the moment. I’m too busy working on the putty plugin 😉

cheers, Stefan