For a second I was terrified they were getting rid of Remote Desktop Connection, but thank god they're just getting rid of an application I've never used and don't care about

To be fair, the ‘old app’ was quite good, it allowed you to setup multiple RDP connections in one place, flip between them, save credentials etc even have a little thumbnail of what the connection looked like. Yes nothing you couldn’t do with multiple MSTSC ‘connections’, but it was more convenient.

The Windows App, ye Gods, it does nothing better from what I can see, and on a Mac, it crashes with alarming regularity, especially if you just want to terminate an RDP session but not log off, if you actually do want to log off, and often if you just look at it in the wrong way.

It’s about as stable as a jelly nailed to the wall!

I'm OK as long as they don't make Mark Russinovich remove his RDCMan.exe tool from https://live.sysinternals.com. Goodbye MSTSC.exe, you served us well!

As explained in the article, the built-in Remote Desktop Connection client (mstsc.exe) is not going anywhere.

The older Microsoft Remote Desktop in the article is a Microsoft Store -only app that provides access to (Azure) VDI infrastructure.

Micros~1 has developed 'Microsoft App' last year, which has feature parity with the aforementioned Microsoft Remote Desktop app and that's the reasons the former app is now to be discontinued.

The naming of both Microsoft Remote Desktop AND Microsoft App is atrocious, no question about it!

RDCMan is a connection manager/frontend for the mstsc.exe, part of Sysinternals and supported. (I guess it's feature complete since last version was 2 years ago - works for me as well)

mstsc is actually based on Citrix code Microsoft's lawyers extorted out of Citrix 25 years ago.

Cheers for highlighting it to me — wasn't aware of exactly what it did (have been meaning to go through all of the tools since they were winternals but really all I use anymore is procexp). I rarely need to RDP anymore let alone view a bunch of connections simultaneously, so I'll stick with three-character aliases for connections that I can invoke from Win+R and bear rdcman in mind for some ghastly future where I'm a sysadmin again

Microsoft used to be known as geniuses at marketing - if not software development. But how silly is this? No more Remote Desktop app, but you still have to use Remote Desktop to use remote desktop (RDP) connections? And for everything else you use "Windows App"? Coming soon: Office (sorry, MS 365) will now be renamed as "Info Fiddling App". Flight Sim 2024 will be "Boundary Layer App"...

Office has already been rebranded on Android as "M365 Copilot"... I wish I was joking

Same on the Windows version (which I've never seen the point of anyway - if you want Word, Excel, etc, just load them - there's no need to load an app to then load another program).

And of course 'M365 Copilot' is treated as a new app in the Windows store, and pushed out automatically - meaning that if you use Intune you need to create a new app rule to nuke the bugger or it'll appear on all your machines.

[...] if you want Word, Excel, etc, just load them - there's no need to load an app to then load another program[...].

There is if you're Micros~1.

Nobody knows what that reason is, and certainly no one can articulate it. But it's there, you just have to be Micros~1 to see it. Thank Ghod for the rest of us...

Sunshine and Moonlight work well enough. Parsec used to be fantastic! and then they dropped Windows 7 support. Guys, I still game on Steam from my Win7 VM, gimme a break. Sadly I think there is still nothing as performant as Parsec, too bad I can’t use it.

Customers using the Remote Desktop app must migrate by May 27.

Customers?

You must be joking!

Peons might be more appropriate.

Indeed they don't have customers, supplicants, maybe?

Well “hostages” is already the accepted term for Oracle’s market base, and Oracle would probably sue if anyone else used that term, so another word would seem to be called for!

I think the term you're looking for is product .

Remote Desktop App, while like most of MS App Store, people avoided, actually tried to give you a one pane view into all your RDC connections.

Remote Desktop Connection, fits like many things into that that, "looks old", but unlike newer MS things, actually works... is now "the working way."

Windows App, which strives to be modern, is restricted and controlled, and thus, pretty much unusable.

This is why when somebody points me at "new and shiny" from Microsoft, I yawn. Today's MS "best" is tomorrow's trash.

MS making most of the FUD and lies they spread about Linux applications for years moot.

> Today's MS "best" is tomorrow's trash.

Today's MS "best" is today's trash. Fixed it for you.

Today's best trash is MS. FTFY both

Alternatively, Microsoft: Tomorrow's trash, Today™

Never tried the Remote Desktop App but I'm willing to bet I could land on the desktop of my choice using the keyboard quicker than the store app could even load whatever godforsaken GUI it probably uses to manage the connections.

In fact if I had it installed I doubt I'd even be able to find it on the start menu, given recent Windows versions' ever-more-questionable ability to match the application of the name that you literally just typed in verbatim , as opposed to some other application whose name may or may not share the first letter of what you typed.

"Microsoft Remote Copilot Unified Amalgamated Integrated Cluster Desktop Viewing Control App".

Now everybody on the committee has "had the voice of their narrative" heard.

Sorry, that name isn't suitable - someone reading that name might get an idea of what it actually does, and we can't have that, can we? And it's easy to search for on t'internet too.

"Windows App" is clearly a much better choice as it achieves both aims of having a name which gives no indication of the app's purpose, while at the same time being nearly impossible to search for as most of the results will be irrelevant!

Nobody at my last job could understand why I thought "data platform" was a stupid name for the "system" (a vaguely disparate bunch of DBs in a SQL Server instance running on an Azure VM, thus achieving the throughput and latency of a mid-range mobile phone from 2012) they'd brought me in to manage.

This shit always reminds me of the Jack Dee line about disliking the term "OAP" because it's like telling somebody the same thing three times.

> achieving the throughput and latency of a mid-range mobile phone from 2012

Like Exchange Online is about as fast as an Exchange 2010 on Server 2008 (not R2) in 2012, but on spinning 10k drives, not on SSD (but with enough RAM to run good - don't take away the RAM).

The comparison with "as fast as 13 years ago" is quite close to a lot of things, like the Windows 11 24h2 UI and so on.

"Data Platform"? How quaint. you need to consider the current euphemism term: Data Lake

Sounds like an old Genesis tune heard with cotton in one's ears...

One of my top prioritites to disable on all of my home PCs.

They can rename it whatever they want, I'll disable it anyway.

"I'll disable it anyway."

You can try....

I absolutely can't wait for this to ruin my life a little bit further.

What about wordpad? Notepad? F Microsoft project managers.

You can copy the calc.exe from Windows NT 3.51, 4.0, XP or Sever 2003, and it just works in Win11. I recommend stealing it from the 2003 R2 x64 service pack 2. And get a few other important thinks from the latter package, like the task manager...

BTW: calc.exe from NT 3.51 does NOT do the force 0.234e-4 notation if you don't want it. But I switched to powershell for many calc stuff. Especially since [decimal]1/3 runs with 128 bit precision, compare without the enforced [decimal] type.

Other alternative: Run Server 2022 or Server 2025, where the calc.exe on both is still the better classic, not re-skinned thingy.

I have the problem that mstsc only uses Kerberos (as a client) when several weird combinations match. No problem within the same AD-domain, problematic within multidomain forest, very problematic with trusts, very very very problematic without trust, impossible if you type in the IP of the remote you want to connect to. The latter is what I have to use > 90% of the time to support, and neither my Laptop, nor the dedicated jump server are in the same domain as the final jump server. And for security reasons a lot of things are blocked.

mstsc tries NTLM, which I want to get rid of, but I still cannot. Normally you should be able to say "force kerberos, with this username, and this is the actual FQDN of the host to use for auth, even though I connect directly via IP" - but no. Can this new thing do? Well, I suspect not, since things that make sense don't get implemented. Can any RDP client do this? Open for suggestions here!

Just like my coworkers fight the stupidness of "new outlook" because they have to use it (how else could they support it) while I still tug along with less cursing with my "old" outlook, it will be the same with this new RDP client. I already tried the android version of the new RDP client, and kicked it for the variant from devolutions.net (will check tomorrow for a win-version, maybe I am lucky ?)..