The Classroom Connect tool.

Classroom Connect

Me and Mr. Johan Arwidmark was working on a class room solution. In such solution there is a reason to be able to connect, and there are few built in to Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016.

Remote Desktop

Absolutely needed for poking around but does not solve all scenarios.

Remote Desktop using a shadow session

This is great, it connects to the host and then does a shadow session for the logged-on student

Remote Assistance

A nice feature, but it does require the end user accept a connection from the helper

Command line utility = Scriptable

All method above can be used with command line tools, and that gives us the ability to create some nice scripts, but to make it a bit finnier, lets do it as a UI in PowerShell. The only trick we had, was that a shadow copy is connected to a session, and since the built-in RDS PowerShell tools cannot be used, since we don’t have a “solution” deployed, we found a way to use qwinsta.exe and then filter the result to find the student name when it matches the machine name, and hey, we have the session ID and now we can connect using mstsc.exe using /shadow

So, after spending one hour on a Sunday evening at a hotel in Phoenix, here is Classroom Connect.

Get it from GitHub – https://github.com/DeploymentBunny/ClassroomConnect/

/mike