Ondrej Sevecek's English Pages

With Windows 2008 R2 it was possible to export standalon RDP file for each remote app defined in the RemoteApp Manager console. The RemoteApp Manager console is not present on Windows 2012 and you must configure the remote apps using the new server manager console instead. The server manager console does not allow you to export RDP files. Instead, users are required to start remote applications through the rdweb browser application only.

If you want to export the RDP file contents though, you can do it manually with PowerShell from the RD connection broker computer. You must use the Win32_RDCentralPublishedRemoteApplication WMI class found in root\cimv2\TerminalServices namespace:

# to display the contents for all applications
gwmi Win32_RDCentralPublishedRemoteApplication -namespace root\cimv2\TerminalServices | select Name, RDPFileContents

# to export the RDP file contents for a remote app into an RDP file
'calc' | % { 

    $app = $_
    gwmi -Query "SELECT * FROM Win32_RDCentralPublishedRemoteApplication WHERE Name = '$app'" -Namespace root\cimv2\TerminalServices | select -Expand RDPFileContents | Set-Content "$app.rdp"
}

Alternatively, you can start the remote app from browser. You need to disable the RDP client ActiveX control - you open the internet explorer's Managed Add-ons dialog box and disable the MsRdpClientShell class aka the Remote Desktop Services ActiveX Client. When you disable the activex control, browser will let you download the RDP file instead of serializing its parameters directly into the mstsc client.