My name is David Bélanger, and I’m a program manager on the Remote Desktop team working on Remote Desktop apps for the different Windows platforms. Back in April, we released the first version of the Microsoft Remote Desktop Preview app for Windows Phone 8.1 and added new features like pinning and support for Word Flow in our June release .
We’d love to hear about your top feature requests and what would make the app truly shine for you. Head on over to our new feedback site to request new features or vote on your favorites.
This blog highlights some of the changes we’ve made to the app which will be available from the Windows Phone Store later today as we continue working to add support for Remote Desktop Gateway, RemoteApp and Desktop Connections and the new Microsoft Azure RemoteApp service later this year.
Improved ability to connect to your home PC by nameWith this release, we’ve made improvements to the way we search for remote PCs when you provide a short PC name, such as "HOME-PC". In addition to standard DNS lookups we have implemented NETBIOS name resolution, so as long as you have network line of sight to a remote PC you should be able to initiate a connection.
Remote keyboard has been resizedWhen using Office 2013 and Windows Store apps in a remote session, the remote on-screen keyboard is automatically displayed when tapping in an area that can accept text input. With this update, the keyboard will now be scaled appropriately for your device, making it easier to type.
Figure 1: Remote keyboard displayed on a Lumia 920 device.
Try it nowIf you haven’t tried it yet, I encourage you to download the Remote Desktop Preview app from the Windows Phone store today and enjoy the rich Windows experience on your Windows Phone 8.1 device. To upgrade your Windows Phone 8 device to the Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview and get access to all the tools, start with the following Windows blog post .
The Remote Desktop app is also available on your other devices ( Windows 8.1 , iOS , Mac OS X , and Android ).
Stay tuned for future updates as we work on adding Microsoft Azure RemoteApp support this summer and more enterprise-focused features including Remote Desktop Gateway, RD Connection Broker, and Remote Resources (RemoteApp and Desktop Connections) later this year.
Note: Questions and comments are welcome. However, please DO NOT post a request for troubleshooting by using the comment tool at the end of this post. Instead, post a new thread in the Remote Desktop clients forum . Thank you!