Its, Monday morning so time for some fun!

A customer asked me if it was possible to install Internet explorer 8 beta, and still be able to use Internet explorer 7 for old applications (in their test environment). Of course I answered and immediately started testing. As you all know Microsoft app-v does not support sequencing internet explorer so the best thing to do was use VMware’s Thinapp. My base image is an Windows XP SP3 machine, SP3 does not install IE7 or IE7 updates unless you already installed IE7 before upgrading to SP3 (see Microsoft KB) To successfully sequence IE7 to work together with IE8 download the following files:

•             WindowsXP-KB957095-x86-ENU

•             WindowsXP-KB958644-x86-ENU

•             Nlsdl.exe (microsoft)

•             idndl.exe (microsoft)

•             IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe

These downloads will definitely save you some time finding out exactly witch updates you need, after this the Thinapp part is pretty straight forward.

•             Install updates

•             Start capture

•             Install IE7

•             Stop capture

•             Revert machine

•             Install IE8

•             Start the tests

Because this is a fast proof of concept test, I challenge you to drop some improvements in the comments to make it even better.