OEMs, IHVs: Associate your Microsoft Store app with your Hardware Device

Introduction

If you're a device maker with an associated Microsoft Store application (a Hardware Support App), the ideal experience is when the user connects you device to their PC for the first time, the corresponding driver package and Microsoft Store app are installed. To enable this, you'll need to associate the app with the driver package. There are additional steps needed if the app needs to communicate with the driver or RPC endpoint. This post will focus on the first scenario of device and Store app association.

INF File

Specifying App Dependency in Driver Package

In the Driver Package specify the INF AddSoftware Directive.

1. AddSoftware=SoftwareName,[flags],software-install-section
2. Set the SoftwareType entry to 2.
3. Provide the Package Family Name (PFN) of your Store App in the SoftwareID entry. This can be found the the Packaging tab of the packaging.Appxmanifest file in your Visual Studio project.

Specifying Driver Dependency in APPX Manifest

This step is necessary if you need to prevent the app from loading if the driver is not present or to constrain a driver version to a specific app version. The Store can maintain up to 32 versions of your HSA.

In the Appx Manifest specify uap5:DriverDependency and one or more uap5:DriverConstraint.

At least one DriverDependency criteria must be satisfied in order for the app to load.

In this first scenario we don't want the app to load unless the HMDDevice is installed or both the Test and Camera devices are installed and the HMDDevice is not installed.

In this this scenario we've added some date and version constraints - we can see how the version / date of the driver impacts the loading of the app.

More information here: Pairing a driver with a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app - Windows drivers | Microsoft Docs