1

We have a basic msi installer made by installshield. The purpose of the installer is to install a WPF application. This installer has a number of prerequisites, that are part of the installer .exe file and will be installed as a first step of the install if necessary. One of them is Sql Server Localdb.

We're now looking at creating an .msix installer. We've made some progress using the visual studio project type called "Windows Application Packaging Project". The resulting .msixbundle file installs our program under Program File\WindowsApps.

Now comes the question of how to install the prerequisites that are necessary for our program to work. Is this possible using msix?

Fred
  • 187
  • 5
  • 23

1 Answers1

3

For this MSIX packages include support for dependencies. The operating system will automatically get those dependencies and install when your user installs the app.

As you can see from the MSFT docs, the dependencies include a reference to another msix/apps package. So what do you do if you need to install an application that is not packaged in this new format (a highly probable situation).

Microsoft published an update (that they say it should be used only by game devs) that indicates we could trigger the installation of an MSI/EXE from the main MSIX package that installs our app.

If you didn't noticed from my profile, I work in the Advanced Installer team. Here we are currently investigating this support to see if/how MSIX packages could bundle other older setups to create a "hybrid" distribution method.

[Update] Including Fred's comment from below. A sample on how to trigger an MSI from an MSIX package: https://www.advancedinstaller.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=41018#p110135

Bogdan Mitrache
  • 10,536
  • 19
  • 34
  • Thanks for the info. The dependencies sounds interesting. Do you think it's possible to bundle the dependencies to support offline installs? I got a message from a microsoft representative regarding triggering installation of msi:s from an msix and he recommended me to look at launching a powershell script via the Package Support Framework. Haven't really to managed to get it working yet though. – Fred Oct 14 '19 at 09:29
  • Hi Fred, We just demo-ed our support for PS scripts. If you want preview access to this release please email our team at support@advancedinstaller.com and include a link to this thread so my colleagues will know I sent you to them. Advanced Installer has full integration for PSF in MSIX packages, including the latest support for Powershell. However, the MSI that you need to install would need to be either downloaded or accessible from a network share, as I currently don't know of any way to bundle them inside the MSIX, therefore I don't have an answer yet for the offline installs. – Bogdan Mitrache Oct 14 '19 at 10:57
  • @Fred, I've found the following discussion with a sample project attached. It seems that that you are allowed to trigger MSI installation from an MSIX package. Hope this helps: https://www.advancedinstaller.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=41018#p110135 – J.Tribbiani Aug 02 '20 at 12:44