PowerShell Automation? Does it sound familiar to you?

If you are in the software packaging business, you might have heard of WIX bootstrapper. This was released by Microsoft back in 2004, and it was the first ever open source license project for them.

One fundamental rule in almost any enterprise regarding applications is to disable the auto-updates feature. However, from an enterprise point of view, it makes sense.

It seems our PowerShell Automation support is a hit, we already have a ton of improvement requests, and some are now ready, extending our registry and folders management options.

Sometimes you might end up in a situation when you cannot uninstall a package. We already covered how you can recache an MSI in our user guide. However, we noticed that this might not work for transforms (MSTs) and a different solution is needed.

VLC media player (or in short VLC) is an open-source, cross-platform media player created by VideoLan. At the moment, its one of the most popular players on the market.Let’s see if we can convert it to the new MSIX technology by Microsoft and what challenges we face in doing so.

In this new version, we have focused on solving many of the issues reported by our community. With more than 70 bug fixes, we are proud to announce that this is one of the most stability focused release this year.

Notepad++ is the most popular free source code editor. Since MSIX is the future of packaging, let’s see how we can repackage Notepad++ to MSIX by using Advanced Installer.

PS Automation, PS Automation, PS Automation, PS Automation, PS Automation...

Let’s assume that you have an application that installs files or registry in a user location. In this article we explain how you can install that information for all users by using MSI, APP-V or the new Microsoft installer technology, MSIX, a short cleanup process description, and a short comparison between them.

In the lifecycle of an application package, it comes a point when an update is required. Whether we want to fix minor bugs and vulnerabilities, or we come up with some improvements and big changes to our app, we must deliver it as an update.

In January 2020, Windows 7 end of life support comes in place. This means that users won’t receive any updates from Microsoft, and companies have to pay extra for the next three years if they want them.

In the past 12 months, we've worked hard on setting the foundation of the new packaging and deployment technology, MSIX. We also continued listening to your feedback, and that led us towards one of our biggest bug-fixing effort in years, along with some important architectural redesigns, all aimed at making your work easier.

All MSIX packages must be digitally signed, no exception. In order to digitally sign your MSIX package, you can use a self-signed certificate. However, you need to ensure that same certificate used to sign the MSIX package is imported into the Computer's Trusted Root Certification Authorities on the target device where you plan to deploy your MSIX package. Otherwise, your MSIX will fail to install.

In our days, many apps offer you a context menu. A context menu is a pop-up menu that appears after a user interaction, for example, in Windows, when you perform a right-click. However, there are two types of context menus:

Before we begin, it is important we know that starting with SCCM version 1806, MSIX application is supported in System Center Configuration Manager. Integrating MSIX apps in previous versions, does not work. Also the current version of Windows 10 that supports MSIX is version 1809. It is announced that Microsoft will add support for MSIX also on other versions of Windows 10.

The latest version of Advanced Installer brings you a new set of features and improvements across all editions.

If we check the official Microsoft documentation about PackageName and appID, we can see that in theory, there aren’t so many differences between them.

Hover is a free tool built by the Advanced Installer team that allows you to run natively installed applications inside an MSIX/App-V container.

There are times when you need to install multiple applications at once, either EXEs or MSIs; we call this a suite installation. Wise Installer was one of the most popular software tool used for creating application installers. It was discontinued in November 2013 and offered a solution for such cases. In this article, we have a look at how you can achieve that in a simple and modern manner using Advanced Installer compared with the old ways of Wise Studio.