Supposing I was developing a fairly graphically intensive application (C++ or C#, graphics API undecided) for which most of the usage will be by remote users over RDP (either terminal server sessions or remote access to a single-user machine). It's obvious that non-essential "eye-candy" effects and animations should be avoided. My questions are:
What should I be careful to do/avoid doing to make most efficient use of the RDP protocol ? (e.g I have an idea RDP can remote some graphics drawing primitives straight to the client... but is that only for GDI ? Does using double-buffering break such remoting and force a bitmap mode ? Does the client-side bitmap cache "just work" or does it only cache certain things like fonts and icons ?)
Is there any sort of RDP protocol analyser available which will give some insight into what an RDP stream is actually transporting (in particular, bitmaps vs drawing primitives) ? (I can imagine adding some instrumentation to the rdesktop source to do this, but maybe something exists already).
In my experience I'd be careful when it comes to animations - especially fade up/down controls that can seriously kill performance over RDP.
Double-buffering might also cause some problems, however I personally haven't had to do too much in the way of workarounds for this - the article by Raymond Chen explains the possible pitfalls quite well.
Essentially, it's a good idea to check in code whether it's running in a remote sessions (RDP, Citrix, etc). Take a look at: GetSystemMetrics( SM_REMOTESESSION ) - you can then decide at runtime whether to enable or disable certain features.