How To: Create a Microsoft Remote Desktop 8 Connection

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On October 18th Microsoft released version 8 of it’s Remote Desktop app via the App Store. Which is great as the older version had been more than buggy & we’ve just started a project which requires users to RDP into VM’s.

Below are the steps taken to figure out how a connection is created and stored, as well as a way to script the connections.

Investigation

Following Rich Troutons excellent steps I managed to download a copy that is App Store account free.

Next steps was to figure out how to deploy connections to this app. Well, that’d be a simple plist in ~/Library/Preferences right? Nope! Remember this is Microsoft (the people whom use a plist in the format of the windows registry…), so off armed with TextWrangler, Composer & steely determination I went about figuring this thing out.

I loaded up Composer & ran “Monitor File System Changes” then preceded to create a connection in Microsoft Remote Desktop. it appears that the path of the plist is indeed not standard & exists in: ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.rdc.mac/Data/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.rdc.mac.plist

UPDATE: As per the comments below, it appears for Mac App Store application plists is always in this location

A Quick Look in Finder of the plist showed that at the top there is an array which contains a UUID for each Connection.

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This UUID string is then used within each key to differentiate settings between connections.

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Luckily enough the UUID seems to be generated using the simple command below & so can easily be scripted using:

uuidgen

From there on it’s pretty straightforward to create a script, below is the GUI with the variable names as per the script which can be found on at the bottom of this post

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Examples of variables to pass can be seen in my Casper Remote window below:

Create a Microsoft Remote Desktop 8 Connection

In the above example I have left the UUID field blank, which will create one when the script runs. You could specify your own UUID by generating one via the uuidgen command above & thus give you the ability to easily update a Connections settings down the line.

Once the above is run, the connection should appear My desktops section within the Microsoft Remote Desktop app.

Create a Microsoft Remote Desktop 8 Connection Conections

This now reminds me to Vote Up the following feature request to allow a script to be used multiple times within a policy so this could be used to specify multiple servers, if you agree it’s here.

Script