Software packaging is the process of building an installer that includes all your applications' resources and can be used to distribute them on the end-user devices.

MSIX packages lack built-in support for installing a desktop shortcut. This is mainly because Microsoft recommends that user preferences are exclusively chosen by the user. So, for instance, creating a Desktop shortcut or pinning it to the Taskbar or Start Menu are not things we can control.

Many popular Windows features like Notifications, File Explorer Context Menu or Shares cannot be used by non-(MSIX)-packaged Win32 applications.

A “Sparse” package contains an AppxManifest.xml but, unlike a regular/full package, the manifest can reference files outside its package in a predetermined 'external location’.

Although not as popular and widely adopted as MSI, ClickOnce has been around for some time in the application packaging industry. ClickOnce enables you to create self-updating Windows-based applications that can be installed and run with minimal user interaction.

Prior to Windows 10 version 2004, if your MSIX package contained an HKCU registry and your application tried to modify it, the operation would crash.

Applications behave differently when running within an MSIX container. For example, you cannot set a non-executable file as a target for your application by default.

In this article, we will take a look at how MSIX technology handles log files whenever an installation issue occurs.

MSIX has been available for almost four years now, since Microsoft first announced it. Although 2021 did not deliver all of the advances I had hoped for, I was pleased to see MSIX adoption continue to expand on a regular basis.

When Win32 applications run inside an MSIX container, they behave differently than when they are installed natively. Because of that, we come across errors in the operations we often perform.

With Intune, Microsoft made it easier to deploy MSIX/APPX packages in your infrastructure.

Based on my experience, when working with beginner IT Pros who are starting out with MSIX, there's a common misconception when defining registry keys.

In 2018, MSIX was announced by Microsoft as the new universal package format for Windows 10 apps with the later support on desktop, mobile, and other Windows 10 devices.

Python is one of the most widely used programming languages, due to its versatility. In a previous article, we covered how to create an MSI for a Python application, where we first converted the Python into an exe and then created an MSI for that Python executable.

Sometimes, we have a package folder in our MSIX, containing files that are not part of the redirected locations list. Since all the folders need to be part of the known-VFS list, we need to use a fixup to copy those files from the WindowsApps folder (after the MSIX is installed) to the location you want.

Advanced Installer was the first application to fully support MSIX technology – and we truly believe in its power.

One thing that fellow developers and IT Pros quickly notice about MSIX is that applications can behave differently when running in an MSIX container.

Get a quick 5,000 words introduction that will bring you up to speed with the latest packaging and deployment technology for Windows.

MSIX uses the same PowerShell cmdlets available for AppX packages. But Microsoft added aliases for them not to create confusion between the AppX and MSIX packages.Let’s go through some of them with a few examples.

Why does my MSIX app fail to find files from the package? The short answer is that this is related to how the files inside the VFS folder are, or are not, virtualized.