If you, like me, are using applications (or games) available on Spoon.net on a regular basis, you could find it not so practical to start your browser and go to the Spoon.net website and start your favorite application from there.

Here is how you enable shortcuts and file type associations for Spoon.net applications

For this to work you need to have launched the application from the Spoon.net website first. This means you have to install the Spoon plugin, create an account and launch the application of your choice. It seems you need to launch the app more then once. This is to get all the application's data on your system, since Spoon's virtualization technology doesn't require all of the application data to start an application. This to provide a good end-user experience. After you launched the application from the website, do a search in the %localappdata%\Spoon to check if you have the application's Spoon Virtual Machine (.SVM) file:

Keep the search window open.

Open a new Explorer window and browse to %localappdata%\Spoon\Cache\Xreg\SomeVersion#

Here you find the Xreg.exe tool which handles local registration of shortcuts and file types.

With the two Explorer windows open, now drag the applications .SVM file on top of the Xreg executable. 

Associated shortcuts and file types are now registered on your system. The application now also works offline!

To remove the shortcuts and file type assocications use: Xregpath\Xreg /unregister AppPath\App.svm

Running your own Spoon Server

If you were running the business product called Spoon Server yourself, then you have the possibility to control the registration of shortcut and FTAs centrally. Something maybe Spoon.net could allow as an option from there site also.

You can play with Spoon Server and the Studio, which creates the Spoon virtual applications, for 30 days with the Trial version downloadable here: http://spoon.net/Server

UPDATE 13.03.2011

Today I received an email from the CEO of Spoon.NET. They launched the public beta of Silver Spoon. Silver Spoon is a paid subscription which allows for an extended feature set to the default Spoon.net functionality.

Silver Spoon allows for:

Sandbox synchronization: Sync your application settings to the cloud (You can use 100MB for free, when you don't have Silver Spoon)

Folder synchronization: Store your documents in the cloud. This allows synchronization between all your Spoon enabled desktops.

Application synchronization: Synchronize your own applications between your desktops. This is a very cool feature deserving its own blogpost.

Desktop integration: The original reason of my blog post was to show how to enable desktop integration from Spoon.net. This is not longer necessary any more with Silver Spoon. Silver Spoon enables this feature easily from the Spoon management console per application.

Silver Spoon comes with 50GB of storage space and costs $12 a month.

Subscribing to Silver Spoon is done though the Spoon management console/client which resides in your system tray.

Read the Silver Spoon blog post at: http://blogs.spoon.net/post/11-03-12/Silver_Spoon_is_now_in_public_beta.aspx