Starting a Windows app from a Mac app in Parallels or VMWare

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Starting a Windows app from a Mac app in Parallels or VMWare

Given:

Mac with either Parallels or VMWare
A virtual machine with Windows installed.
A Windows GUI application Foo.exe installed in that Windows virtual machine.
A Mac application Bar.app

I'd like to start Foo.exe from Bar.app.

What are reasonable approaches to do this for Parallels?

How about VMWare?

Note: I've tried using Parallel's "prlctl exec" command, which can run a command on the VM's OS -- but I have not managed to make it launch a GUI application on the VM's display.

One way is:

You can register/associate file types in MAC OS X to exes in VMWare. So by programmatically launching an associated data file in the Finder it would launch the appropriate VMWare WindowsApp's exe.

Tony Lambert 2010-09-28 16:18:32

We also discovered that both Parallels and VMWare create Mac-side wrapper applications for the Windows executables. Depending on version and vendor, these wrappers may be in the VM or out. In our case, the user can locate an application, and we start exactly the same application, whether it's native or a wrapper for an executable on a VM.

Andy Thomas-Cramer 2010-09-28 21:43:09