Running XenMobile MDX Toolkit on Windows and virtualized Macs

It’s a well-known rumor in the Citrix XenMobile world, that if you want to start with XenMobile and Appcontroller, you have to buy a Mac. The reason for that is the Citrix MDX Toolkit only runs on Mac OS X on physical hardware. I decided give it a try on a virtualized Mac and Windows.

Wrapping Applications on a virtualized Mac

For wrapping/creating .mdx files on a Mac you’ll need to install JDK1.7, XCode, Xcode Command Line Tools and Citrix MDX Toolkit.

This is how MDX Toolkit looks like when running it in a VM:

mdx-wizard-vm-failed-300x289

compared to a non-virtual mac:

mdx-wizard-hardware-fine-300x288

It looks quite unusable. But hey, MDX Toolkit is just a GUI application triggering a command line. For IOS it is triggering the CGAppCLPrepTool application with some parameters. Let’s check if the command line works:

./CGAppCLPrepTool Wrap -Cert “iPhone Distribution: Joe Public (ABCDEF1234)” -Profile “citrix_distribution.mobileprovision” -in “myapplication.ipa” -out “myapplication.mdx” -appdesc “doing this stuff from commandline”

As a result you’ll get the expected .mdx file – Upload this file to Appcontroller and it will work.

mdx-toolkit-cmd

Wrapping Android Applications on Windows

For wrapping applications for Android you’ll need to have JRE, Android SDK and MDX Toolkit installed. Let’s check what happens if you copy the whole /Applications/Citrix/MDX Toolkit Folder to a Windows machine.

First we need to create a Keystore:

“c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_67\bin\keytool.exe” -genkey -dname “cn=Android, o=Android, c=US” -keystore C:\temp\demo.keystore -storepass android -alias wrapkey -keypass android -keysize 1024 -sigalg SHA1withRSA -keyalg RSA

mdx-create-keystore-300x38

Next step is to wrap the application – I’m wrapping the Citrix Worx Mail app in this example:

“c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_67\bin\java.exe” -jar C:\temp\MDXToolkit\ManagedAppUtility.jar wrap -in c:\temp\apps\CitrixEmail9.0-release.apk -out c:\temp\apps\CitrixEmail9.0-release.mdx -keystore C:\temp\my.keystore -storepass android -keyalias wrapkey -keypass android

mdx-wrap-apk-application-300x233

No errors – looks fine, worx|ks fine.. and means you can wrap Android applications on Windows. You just need somebody who will install the MDX Toolkit one time and provide you the extracted installation files.