Force Desktops to launch in Full Screen mode – XenApp 7.5/XenDesktop 7.0,7.1 and 7.5

I have done this so many times before with my previous deployments with just by enabling a simple setting within the Citrix console but not anymore with the latest editions of Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop. Citrix seems to have taken away that handy little setting from the Delivery Group properties. My environment is based on XenApp 7.5 with Storefront 2.5. The Receiver version running on the client device is 4.1 and the version running on the Hosted Shared Desktops is Enterprise Receiver 3.4

Issue – Users complain that they are unable to maximize their hosted shared desktop sessions to fill their dual monitors. When they launch desktops, the session tend to fill only one screen and most of the time it is the screen from where the browser is run. Users are hitting a NetScaler gateway page in my case and this will also work for users directly accessing the Storefront page without NetScaler.

 

Resolution – There are a few fixes out there in the internet on tweaking the registry which didn’t work for me . What worked for me is to add an entry in default.ica file that is present in Storefront server and here is the entry and it need to be added to the [Application] section in the file. Also note that, this will only force the session to launch in full screen mode initially, users can then resize the session to their hearts content.

DesktopViewer-ForceFullScreenStartup=true

 

The Default.ICA file can be found under AppData folder of the Store name. please note it is the Storename and not the StoreWeb used for Netscaler access.

C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix\Manila\App_Data  where Manila is the name of my store.

 

If you have multiple Storefronts, make this change on all the Storefront servers’ default.ica file. You are done.