#windowsstore — Public Fediverse posts

This is such a crap... "End User License Agreement: this software is free for use at home" - well, ok, but
a) Why can't I see this before???
b) Why can't I click "Ok, cannot use it then"?
Why do I have to go to "installed Apps" instead?
#WindowsStore #CrapOS #PleaseDie

#Microsoft wants to rewrite `explorer.exe` with the #Windows App #SDK and #WinUI3.

The current #explorer is slow af, but somehow I feel like they will manage to make it even slower.

I wanted to try #WinUI a few times now, but they made it impossible to use in a regular program. It has to be a packaged #App and it has to be distributed through the #WindowsStore. And all of a sudden, the #Win32 #GUI seems still fine to me.

Or, actually, #WxWidgets! Did you know it had an update recently?

For the record and in an attempt to contribute to the world's knowledge of holes in Microsoft documentation:

At least the way I did it, for in-process plugins, you need to create the MSIX packages using makeappx and manifests written/edited from a template by you, not generated by Visual Studio or something (copy your AppxManifest.xml file into the directory with your payload files (which has to include all the stuff your application needs to run and any bits like images referenced in the manifest) and run makeappx pack /d InputDirectory /p OutputPackageFile.msix, then use signtool sign to add a signature). The plugins need a <MainPackageDependency> pointing to the main app, and the main app needs to use Windows.ApplicationModel.Package.Current.Dependencies to get the plugin packages and Package.InstalledLocation to find their base directories so you can actually load from them.

It might totally be possible to use Visual Studio's MSIX generation or some third-party thing but I gave up on it after fighting it for a while.

For a .NET non-UWP application like mine, you need to use one of the Windows build-number-specific Target Framework Monikers for .NET 5+, e.g. net5.0-windows10.0.19041.0 (for earlier .NET or C++ or whatever you're sort of on your own since I didn't have to do that, but that page might say and if not look for something about Universal Windows contracts) to get access to Windows.ApplicationModel.

It's not really absurdly complicated but the documentation is not good.

#MSIX #AppX #plugin #plugins #dotnet #Microsoft #Windows #UWP #WindowsStore