Forum Discussion
How to get started today
Amit,
When looking to move your existing apps forward to MSIX, I'd recommend starting with the tooling vendor creating your packages today (if you have one). For example, if you're using the WiX Toolset to create your installation packages, we at FireGiant have created an extension to create .appx packages (and soon MSIX packages when Windows provides full support for MSIX) along with your .msi packages. I expect all the other major packaging vendors will support MSIX as well. If you don't have a vendor already, there are several to choose from (I think this presentation showed them: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/events/build/content/msix-inside-and-out-pptx).
As to your second question, MSIX will allow you deploy directly via SCCM. You can use the Windows Store for Business but it is not a requirement. MSIX deployment is much more like MSI in that way.
Hope that helps.
What if we have a mixture of Win7 & Win10 computers and WinForms & WPF apps. Can MSIX be used to replace ClickOnce and provide the deployment & auto-update for these scenarios? If so, how do we get started reviewing/testing to possibly convert? Thx
- For win 7, as per my knowledge you have to wrap the msix inside a msi and can deploy it. This again is not a good move going back to msi..
Great feedback. We offer the SDK for folks that might want to minimize the packages they create. For Windows 7 it is essentially treating the MSIX file as a .cab file, minimizing the repackaging across multiple operating systems.
John Vintzel
Principal Program Manager Lead, MSIX
- Eagerly waiting for the tool to be released from MS.
You can use the auto updates through App Installer. For more details checkout
1) The build talk MSIX Inside and Out
2) this blog https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/appinstaller/2017/09/27/automated-app-updates-with-appinstaller-file/
3) The documentation for App Installer: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/schemas/appinstallerschema/schema-root
We do offer an auto-updating solution on Windows 10 to replace ClickOnce with MSIX. As for Windows 7, to use MSIX you need to wrap the MSIX file with the MSIX SDK on GitHub. That will allow you to read, extract, verify the package and deploy it the devices. There is no native auto-updating with MSIX on Windows 7, again that would need to leverage the SDK.
For Windows 10, this session covers the update behaviors and more. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/events/build/content/msix-inside-and-out-pptx
