Thinstall (renamed as VMware ThinApp after acquired by VMware) is currently the most popular application virtualization tool. Most often, it is used to make single portable applications, which encapsulate all the related resources of a program (such as EXE, DLL, OCX, registry, etc.) into a single executable (EXE) file, so as to realize the isolation from operating system.
VMware ThinApp 4.7 Essentials (recommended and shared by Thomasz) is a rare tutorial book about VMware ThinApp, which will be very helpful to portable app developers or system administrators. In this book you will totally understand the working principle of application virtualization, and its extremely detailed and thorough production method. This includes how to update and tweak a ThinApp project before building and then publishing it, as well as the precautions of design and implementation for your ThinApp projects.
BTW, don't assume that VMware ThinApp 4.7 is an outdated version. On the contrary, as of this writing, the latest version of VMware ThinApp is v5.2.2, which came with no substantial improvements compared with v4.7. Especially, it leads to an unexpected result - the encapsulated applications will be reported as malware-gen threat by many anti-virus software.
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