MSIX and App Center

The intention of including App Center in this book is to build awareness for the IT Pro because, especially when developers drive internal application processes, it may not always be clear what tools should be used to prototype applications in an enterprise environment. Sometimes, developers are not necessarily aware of the App Center and how it can be used to help enhance their experience in building a line of business applications.

Microsoft’s App Center is a solution for rapidly building, deploying, and testing MSIX and other modern applications. The framework is designed for developers who need to quickly prototype beta code in a production environment while gaining access to important analytics from the application.

At a first glance, many of the management tools for MSIX installation appear to overlap our present goal of managing MSIX packages. Unfortunately, the App Center is not intended as a production solution for application management and should only be used with limited users.

Development and testing with the App Center is encouraged with prototyping application releases. But when your application releases are stable, it's good to sign your code and use one of the other delivery methods available for MSIX packages.