Making portable applications for Windows is not as easy as it looks like

Some commercial program offer the possibility to create portable applications for Microsoft Windows, for software that is not officially distributed as portable. An example of such program which I'll be testing today, is VMware ThinApp 2212.

The application which I'll try to make portable, is "Bentley MicroStation CONNECT Edition - Update 15 [10.15.00.074] [2020, English/Russian]", magnet Info Hash v1 2d512ede2083d41b5851350e40aab85392488c65. First I'll perform a normal install and see how much time does it take, then make it portable and compare.

The operating system is Windows 10 64-bit version 22H2 Build 19045.3086. 

The size of all the installer files ("MicroStation CE15" folder) is 7.88 GB, but not everything will be installed.

NORMAL INSTALL

Normal install (without the 2 extra software) takes 15 min. Size occupied by installed software is about 19 GB. MicroStation runs perfectly fine so no comments on the matter.

CREATION OF PORTABLE VERSION

The creation of a portable requires a lot of space, specially if you choose to build the MSI and compress. The drive has 265GB of free space, with ThinApp installed and all the installer files of MicroStation.

This is the time that takes each step:

• Prescan (scan C: and registry just before installing the software): 7 min.
• Actual installation of MicroStation: 15 min.
• Postscan and comparison: 27 min.
• Entry point configuration: Restricted write access; do not generate MSI package; do not compress virtual package: 4 min.
• Save project files: 36 min.
• Build portable application: 34 min.

Results:

• Total time taken to make the portable: 123 minutes vs normal install which is about 15 min.
  
• Saved project is located at: "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware ThinApp\Captures\CONNECTION Client\"
• Total size for saved project: 55.3 GB
• Total size for portable application itself (subfolder "\CONNECTION Client\bin\"): 27.8 GB
• If generating the MSI package and compress are selected, it will take several hours, maybe half a day. Only choose if the portable application already works.
  

Launching the portable program from "bin\MicroStation CONNECT Edition.exe" always fails. The welcome screen is always presented, but when it's time to load the main window just closes without any message. This is an indication that this program is more difficult to capture than usual, or it's not possible at all (don't know).

If you try to run a portable version made by someone else, it happens the same, doesn't launch at all, so the guy didn't double check that it worked in various systems before publishing: The House of Portable: Bentley MicroStation 10.09 Portable