Which is the advantage of this approach? Let's say that we want to leverage the new feature to display a notification to the user when he opens the application and an update is available. All these values will be replaced with the ones from the manifest and from the project's configuration during the package creation wizard. appinstaller extension, will be included inside the project and it will look like this: Īs you can see, all the information which are dynamic and which are dependent by the package configuration are included with a placeholder, wrapped inside graphs. Among the available templates, you will find a new one called App Installer. Right click on the Windows Application Packaging Project and choose Add → New item. Let's assume that we have a Win32 application packaged with the Windows Application Packaging Project, as in the following image: Thanks to this template, which can be added inside a UWP or Windows Application Packaging Project, you can define the look & feel of the App Installer file and set some of the information as parameters, which will be automatically replaced by the real values during the package generation. Starting from Visual Studio 2019 16.1, instead, there's a better solution: the App Installer template. appinstaller file and manually add the required attributes.

You would need to add to add a task in your pipeline which manipulates the. This approach is hard to maintain, especially if you're planning to leverage an agile approach and setup a CI/CD pipeline to automatically build and deploy your applications. appinstaller file generated by Visual Studio after the package creation process has been completed. What if I want to use one of the new features added in 1903, like adding the ShowPrompt attribute to trigger the update notification? Right now, the only solution is to manually edit the. When you start the wizard to generate a MSIX package and you opt-in for sideloading with auto updates, you can only specify a few options, like the URL where the package will be published and the update frequency. Unfortunately, until a while ago, there wasn't the chance to combine both these features in an easy way. Then, in another post we have learned how Windhas introduced some highly requested features, like the ability to declare an update as critical or to show a prompt to the user to notify him that an update is available.

First, we have learned how to generate such a file with Visual Studio and the wizard to create MSIX packages starting from a UWP project or a Windows Application Packaging Project. N the lasts months we have learned, here in this blog, how App Installer can help you distribute MSIX packages and keep them automatically updated without using the Store.

Visual studio installer