Remote Desktop Connection Manager updated to v2.7

Remote Desktop Connection Manager, or RDC Man, is a wonderful piece of software that I’ve been using for the past eight years. RDC Man is one of those applications, like Outlook, that I open almost every single day and although not directly applicable to EOP or Exchange Online, it is applicable to most operations type folks and so I wanted to share it here. One example, this could be used to manage remote connections to all the servers in your on-premises Exchange environment.

RDC Man is a single application to manage your remote desktop connections all in a single view. Servers are organized into named groups and you can connect or disconnect to all servers in a group with a single command. Servers can inherit their logon settings from a parent group or a credential store. Thus when you change your lab account password, you only need to change the password stored by RDCMan in one place. Personally I use RDC Man to manage my Azure virtual machines, my local Exchange labs, and the servers that I run in my basement at home.


My current setup of Remote Desktop Connection Manager

RDC Man was an internal Microsoft tool for a long time and was first released publically a couple of years ago. The recently published version (published three weeks ago) brings the tool up from version 2.2 to version 2.7. If you have never used this tool before and use RDP, I would highly recommend you take a look.

Download Remote Desktop Connection Manager 2.7 at the Microsoft Download Center.


What's new in version 2.7

New features
• Virtual machine connect-to-console support
• Client size options come from the application config file (RDCMan.exe.config) rather than being hard-coded.
• View.Client size.Custom menu item shows the current size
• View.Client size => From remote desktop size
• Option to hide the main menu until Alt is pressed. Hover over the window title also shows the menu.
• Added Smart groups
• Support for credential encryption with certificates
• Better handling of read-only files
• Added recently used servers virtual group
• New implementation of thumbnail view for more predictable navigation
• Thumbnail view remembers scroll position when changing groups, etc.
• Performance improvements when loading large files
• Allow scale-to-fit for docked servers (Display Settings.Scale docked remote desktop to fit window)
• Allow scale-to-fit for undocked servers (Display Settings.Scale undocked remote desktop to fit window)
• "Source" for inheritance in properties dialog is now a button to open the properties for the source node.
• Focus release pop up => changed to buttons, added minimize option.
• Added command-line "/noconnect" option to disable startup “reconnect servers” dialog
• Session menu items to send keys to the remote session, e.g. Ctrl+Alt+Del
• Session menu items to send actions to the remote session, e.g. display charms
• Domain="[display]" means use the display name for the domain name.

Bugs fixed
• Application is now DPI aware
• Undocking a server not visible in the client panel resulted in the client not being shown in undocked form.
• Ctrl+S shortcut didn’t work at all. It now works and always saves, even if there are no detected changes to the file.
• Shortcut keys didn’t work when focus was on a thumbnail.
• Add/delete profile in management tab. In same dialog instance, profiles are not updated. Similarly adding a new profile from combo doesn’t update the tab.
• Window title was not updated when selected node is removed and no new node selected (open a file, close the file.)
• Connect via keyboard didn’t always give focus when it should.
• Connected Group would always show itself upon connecting to a machine, regardless of setting.
• Selecting a built-in group then hiding via menu option didn’t work properly.
• Editing server/group properties did not always mark a file as changed.
• Non-changes could result in save prompts at exit. This should no longer happen.
• Activating the context menu via the keyboard button was not always operating on the correct node.
• Changing a server/group name doesn’t change window title if the server/group is currently selected.
• ALT+PAGEUP and ALT+PAGEDOWN hotkeys were switched. This is fixed for new installs—for existing files you’ll want to change on the [Tools.Options.Hot Keys] tab.
• /reset command line option wasn’t resetting all preferences
• “Server Tree” option from “Select server” focus release dialog didn’t show the server tree if it was hidden.
• New file directory now defaults to “Documents”.
• ListSessions dialog sometimes popped up in a weird location. Now placed within the main window.