Q. How can I create a command prompt within a Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) application's virtual environment for troubleshooting?

A. Each App-V virtualized application runs within its own virtual environment, which can make it hard to troubleshoot sometimes. It's actually fairly easy to run a command within the virtual environment of an application, such as cmd.exe or Process Monitor.

First you need to get a list of all the short names for the virtual applications on a machine using the command

sftmime /query obj:app /short command

as shown here.

C:\>sftmime /query obj:app /short
Adobe Reader X 10.0.0.1
Microsoft Clip Organizer 14.0.4750.1000
Microsoft Excel 2010 14.0.5130.5003
Microsoft Office 2010 Language Preferences 14.0.4750.1000
Microsoft Office 2010 Upload Center 14.0.4757.1000
Microsoft Office Picture Manager 14.0.4750.1000
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 12.0.4518.1014
Microsoft Office Word 2007 12.0.6425.1000
Microsoft OneNote 2010 14.0.4763.1000
Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 14.0.4754.1000
Microsoft Word 2010 14.0.5123.5000
Paint.NET 3.58.4081.24586
Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office 3.1 9.0.0.9398
XML Editor 14.0.4750.1000

Next, take this short name and use it within the command

sfttray /exe ""

For example, to open cmd.exe within the Adobe Reader X virtual application environment, I would run

sfttray /exe cmd.exe "Adobe Reader X 10.0.0.1"