Forum Discussion
MSIX Breakaway in 22h2+ (win 10 + 11)
I've been packaging in MSIX for a while now, but recently find myself troubleshooting more and more applications with child processes that are executing outside the msix container.
I haven't been able to find anything in the xml reference that controls the behavior, but it would certainly be nice if it could be added to the app manifest.
the examples are pretty niche to the industry, but symphony chat is a good example. They have a screen snipping tool that executes as a separate exe. by default it doesn't work, if run via invoke-commandindesktoppackage with -preventbreakaway, it works as expected.
My workaround has been to make wrapper exe's and use psf to launch the wrapper (which subsequently is just a compiled powershell with invoke-commandindesktoppackage)
I'd like a proper solution though, if MS reads this 😄
Tim M you probably will, so if you know of a more elegant solution let me know.
9 Replies
I'm unclear about parts of the scenario. Specifically, about what executables are inside or outside of the package, or packages. Can you be more detailed?
- Linqpad is another example (although more steps to reproduce the issue).
Basically, everything is in the package, but some of the "child" apps are just tools executed from controls within the main application, the child apps aren't in the app manifest (maybe I should try manually adding them). In the symphony example, if you launch Symphony and sign in there is a button to take a screen shot and attach it to chat. When clicked that button launches screen_snipper.exe. By default that screen_snipper.exe is launching outside of the container, then can't find any of the dll's that are part of the container, and fails. When you explicitly tell the package to prevent breakaway, then it works and launches within the container.
Hope that's sufficient information.- mattplan8
I have the same issue with apps calling Word or Excel outside the container while they should start inside. So I reverted those back to App-V. Can you tell me how your workaround works? How would I prevent breakaway of these apps?
Do you mean you just launch the main app with the command invoke-commandindesktoppackage -preventbreakaway? And then all child processes will launch within the container?
- Worth requesting it here?
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/msix-feedback/idb-p/MSIXIdeas
