MSIX with Pre-requisites

I see John missed this one.

With the exception of Win7 backrev deployment, .Net 4.6.1 is guaranteed to be there.  MSIX does have a way to indicate package dependencies, but within the MSIX tool this means manually editing the AppXManifest.

Most of the time, I expect that an MSIX based app that needs Crystal Reports runtime available will need it available within the app MSIX container.  So an external "native" install or even a unrelated MSIX package listed as a package dependency won't meet your needs so going this dependency route will probably not go well for you. 

You probably can package up Crystal Reports Runtime in an MSIX package, and then your app that depends on it as an Add-On package (Modification package in MSIX Packaging Tool parlance), except that (currently) modification packages don't get shortcuts and you need one (or more) of those.   

So if you have to put the shortcut into CRR, given these limitations today I'd just make a single package with both parts.  It's not as bad of idea as it sounds, as you probably aren't going to change CRR on it's own and you have single instance download and storage at the block level.  So no matter how many packages you build with the CRR in it, you still only download and store it once on the client.