If you are attending BUILD, in Seattle, visit the Advanced Installer booth on the expo floor. We’ve got some great new tools to showcase from our latest release. Together with our Microsoft colleagues, we’ve worked hard over the last couple of months to help you get your desktop application in the Windows Store and reach new users.

Fast forward your desktop application development with the unique debugging options from our new Visual Studio 2015 and 2017 extension, for Desktop Bridge apps. Take a look how easy it is to debug your applications inside an UWP app container, in the video below.

Debug your desktop application inside an UWP app container (Desktop Bridge) using the Visual Studio 2015 and 2017 extension from Advanced Installer Professional edition, or higher.

The digital transformation has changed the way users work across a new generation of devices. If in the past, traditional computers were the only gateway to the digital world for both enterprise and traditional users, the mobile revolution has changed the way people access to digital information: smartphones and tablets have become, more and more, a companion to traditional desktop apps. However, despite this transformation, there are still millions of desktop solutions on the market and the enterprise-ready devices with a mouse and a keyboard are still the most effective way to achieve full productivity.

Make your application stand out from the crowd, use native tiles. You can easily customize how your tile looks in the in Start Menu with options like custom logos, colors and more.

Modernize your deployment, create a single EXE package that installs either an MSI, on Windows 7 or 8.1, or an AppX package on Windows 10, all from a single Advanced Installer project.

Simplify and customize your installer conditions by using the MSI Condition Editor. With features like Auto-complete, Validate or Expression Wizard, you will ensure that your conditions are always correct and up to standards.

Every application is a puzzle for IT professionals to figure out when it comes to a customized, silent deployment. What switches will the setup accept? How can automatic updates be disabled? How can shortcuts be managed? How can system restarts be prevented?

Transforms enable fast and easy MSI preparing for automatic deployment. Create responsive and differential transforms with just a few clicks, following our wizard.

As a Visual Studio Industry Partner, we at Caphyon are always working together with Microsoft to improve the Visual Studio experience of our users. To see how Visual Studio and Advanced Installer work together check out the links at the bottom of the page.

In the latest Windows Insiders update there is a new OS-level switch that allows users to block installation of Win32 apps outside of the Windows Store. This means your MSI/EXE setups may no longer install for users that have this option enabled.

Excited about the upcoming Visual Studio 2017? So are we! That is why, together with Microsoft, we have prepared a fresh update for our Windows Installer tools integration into the integrated development environment.

Productive virtual application debugging requires an understanding of the basic fundamentals of debugging compiled software code. For this part of my series on debugging virtual applications, I will be focusing exclusively on these fundamentals. If you are already familiar with these concepts, please allow me to quickly recap these to those readers which may be either not familiar, or only somewhat and looking to solidify these concepts.

Document your repackaging process and save time on package maintenance operations and training new packagers, by using the Repackager Assistant.

Recently I have been seeing many queries regarding shortcut icon not displayed after publishing a virtualized App-V 5.x package. The answer would be quite simple. But I would like to demonstrate it with a simple example so that it can shed some light.

Save time and streamline the software packaging process inside your company. The Repackager Assistant included in this release automatically creates documentation for any application you repackage.

Take full control over your MSI tables with Advanced Installer's built-in editor. Extend the easy to use options from our GUI, and customize your package just as you need to.

For many application packagers, virtual application sequencers, and general IT pros, the concept of actual “debugging” can take on many meanings. Often the words “troubleshooting” and “debugging” are interspersed – especially when reading articles and blogs dealing with the topic of trying to dissect what may be occurring when a virtual application is not functioning as expected. When we speak of the word “debugging” in the context of its meaning with regards to programming and compiled software code, it is simply the dissection and reverse engineering of binaries to determine the root cause of an issue or basically “find the bug” in the code.

Automation is never enough. Save time, eliminate human errors and streamline your build process with the predefined support for build events from Advanced Installer.

Industry expert Rory Monaghan, in collaboration with Jurjen van Leeuwen and Ruben Spruijt, released their Application Virtualization Smackdown 2016 whitepaper in early November '16.