A digital signature guarantees the authenticity of an electronic document or message in an electronic format. In the software industry, code signing provides an added layer of security and trust that you're using a code that comes from an original vendor and not a third-party that could have maliciously altered the code.

Starting with Windows 10 (version 20H2), Microsoft added the option to group MSIX Shortcuts in the Start Menu. This is a particularly convenient feature that was highly requested by the packaging community.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's a certain feeling of relief and achievement when we finally launch our application to the Microsoft Store.

Sometimes we need to have a single distribution package as an MSIX, which includes MSIX supported features along with MSI features that are no longer available (such as old drivers).

MSIX delivered Shared Package Containers to allow applications to share their files and registries, enabling classic Win32 apps to communicate with each other without changing any code.

While for MSIs, this was an optional step, signing your MSIX package is mandatory. Microsoft’s MSIX technology requires the use of code signing certificates to deploy packages.

If there's something we've mentioned over and over again about MSIX is that it requires digital signing. We have a diversity of resources regarding this topic, from why it is a good practice to include a timestamp when signing a package, to automating the whole digital signing process of MSIX Packages.