No support for virtualized environment variables

[TIMOTHY MANGAN]

Applications packaged in the MSIX Packaging tool correctly capture changes to environment variables in the registry, both user and system based.  However, the application does not see these in the environment block when it tries to access them in the runtime.

App-V provided virtualized environment variables and these are needed for a range of applications.

[#2]

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback. Do you have a list of applications in mind? 

-Dian 

[#3]

Java

ArcGIS

AutoCad

and a bunch of the developer tools

[#4]

How it is possible that after a long period of time the MSIX still not support Environment Variables , can someone from Microsoft could answer to this topic? A lot of applications require Environments and they are not supported by MSIX.

[#5]

Yes, even I observed the issue while working with Java. It would be great, if we have any solution for this. Thanks to TIMOTHY MANGAN for highlighting this issue.

[#6]

The free Express edition from Advanced Installer extends the MSIX container with a built-in support for environment variables.
https://www.advancedinstaller.com/express-edition.html

[#7]

Well that was in 2018. WIth no action taken by Microsoft, I did add a specific fixup in the PSF for this situation in 2020 - the EnvVarFixup - which supports package environment variables. This fixup is included in PsfTooling and TMEditX for sure, and probably third party tools like Bogdan mentioned and others.

[#8]

That fixup is indeed compatible with PSF support from AI too, but we had already implemented our own built-in version of the environment fixup, which makes the experience much simpler for the packagers.

Basically, all you need to do is to go to Environment Variables page in AI and add your variables, then AI handles the rest in the background. You don't need to specifically add the fixup in the AppCompat view, as is the case for the Files Redirection fixup, or others.