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.
Will MSIX be able to create an Custom Actions as it is possible with MSI right now? Working closely with a lot of enterprise customers I see this is very common requirement in MSI packages.
Example for CA in MSI: If target machine's Computer Name contains text "ABC" then run specific command line.
Will something similar be possible with MSIX?
The MSIX team has been pretty clear that they see Custom Actions as a problem and thus there are no mechanisms to execute any custom commands during installation. At this time, there isn't any option to get input from the customer during installation either. Custom code will have to be executed by your application.
PS: This is the core reasons I expect the Windows Installer (MSI) will remain the "Anything Installer" (see: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2018/4/30/msix-conjectures/) for quite a while. As MSIX covers more functionality of Windows, it will start to replace more and more MSIs. But Windows provides a wide surface area so I expect it to take a while to support the full breadth of applications.
So how to implement our customizations without a CA? Say running scripts to perform some changes etc..
"Customizations" could mean a couple things. If you mean doing custom install/uninstall time configuration there is no mechanism for doing that. Your application will have to run "customization" code. Or you can use the Windows Installer (MSI).
If you mean "customize" an existing MSIX package after it is shipped, then there is an MSIX Customization Package feature (I forget the real name if that isn't it) coming in the future. They're supposedly a bit like MSI transforms (.MST files) but not as far reaching. Still waiting on the details for that.
Hey Rob,
Quick question, can we use run Custom Actions in MSIX before actual binaries gets installed?
For Instance, if I want to kill an EXE process on a machine before installing/upgrading files or registries via MSI then I can added it to Custom Action Table and sequence it in InstallExecuteSequence at the top.
What are you custom actions doing today? Is it just registry read/write?
