Some SoftGrid gotcha's

In a SoftGrid coaching project with a customer, I discovered some small things that you should know and are not really mentioned clearly in the documentation... Here it goes:

• During the FB1 determination phase, when you can launch the applications that have been defined for that package, the changes to files and registries are included in the package. In other words: the monitoring is restarted during the construction of feature block one!


• In version 4.1 SP1 and 4.2, a modification that was made to a local OSD file are not reset by just performing a refresh of the applications. Only when the OSD file is modified on the server, it is copied again to the client.
  
  That is not really a disaster, but what is worse is that when you delete the OSD file from the cache (from the All Users profile), then 4.1 SP1 and 4.2 no longer are able to create the application!! The error message from the sftlog.txt indicates that the SoftGrid client can no longer find the OSD file (presumably because it wants to compare the local file with the server OSD file to detect changes on the server side). The same goes for ICO files by the way!
  
  This is different from the behavior in 4.1, the OSD file was always copied there. The end-result is that while troubleshooting with SoftGrid 4.1 SP1 and higher, you first need to create a copy of the local OSD file and work from there.
  


• There is no visual indication of whether the SoftGrid client has entered MDO (Minimal Disconnected Operation) mode, which typically occurs when the SoftGrid server is not available but where the application should be allowed to continue to run. However, it is possible to generate a log file that informs you when a certain application has entered the MDO state. More details are in MSKB 931252.