How can I find detailed information about the Microsoft Remote Desktop client application that my application is running in?

Question

I am working on a .NET WPF client application that is frequently accessed by users with iOS devices (usually an iPad) using the iOS Microsoft Remote Desktop application.

Many of our users are unfamiliar with how to reposition the floating app bar that is provided by the iOS client application (the one that provides access to zoom, session disconnect, and keyboard).

That said, when running our client application in full desktop mode, the Remote Desktop app bar is often obscuring a portion of our UI that is a primary means of navigation to certain features within our application.

With this in mind, we would like to know if it would be possible to query detailed information about the Remote Desktop app environment including the exact screen coordinates and dimensions of the iOS app bar so that we can programmatically alert users through our own app UI how to reposition the app bar, or even automatically reposition our client application's navigation bar so that the buttons are never occluded by the iOS RD app bar.

Having a programmatic was for our client application to learn about the exact position of the RD app bar would give us a variety of options as to how to deal with this particular situation.

We have considered some whacky ideas such as opening a WTSVirtualChannel that would involve creating an application service that runs on the RDP server and a companion iOS app that runs on the user's iOS device that forwards screenshots of the entire Remote Desktop app client area, in order to use bitmap comparisons for occlusion detection inside our client app to determine when the iOS RD app bar is occluding the navigation controls in our app. This would require extensive experimentation and is obviously not going to be very performant. We're of course not going down this path, but it just illustrates how important this feature is to our users and the ideas we have contemplated in order to address this particular feature request for our application.

If any of the developers who work on the iOS RD client application or Remote Desktop services as a whole have any clever ideas how we might be able to accomplish this feat, we would greatly appreciate hearing back from them.

Of course, if you could consider this to be a feature request as well...I'm sure we're not the only organization that has tried to deal with remote desktop client app widgets interfering with the client session app user experience.

Answer 1

@Mark Brown

Unfortunately, there is no direct way to query detailed information about the Remote Desktop app environment, including the exact screen coordinates and dimensions of the iOS app bar, from within your .NET WPF client application. The Remote Desktop app environment is managed by the iOS Microsoft Remote Desktop application, and the app bar is part of the iOS app's user interface.

However, there are a few things you can do to work around this issue:

Provide instructions to your users on how to reposition the app bar. You can include instructions in your application's user interface or provide a separate document or video tutorial that explains how to reposition the app bar.

Design your application's user interface to avoid having important controls or navigation elements located in the area of the screen that is likely to be obscured by the app bar. This may require some redesign of your application's user interface, but it can help ensure that your users can always access the controls they need.

Consider using a different remote desktop client application that provides more control over the user interface. There are several remote desktop client applications available for iOS, and some of them may provide more control over the user interface than the Microsoft Remote Desktop application.

Submit a feature request to Microsoft for the ability to query detailed information about the Remote Desktop app environment. Microsoft is always looking for feedback from developers and users, and feature requests can help drive future development efforts.