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Recently (last year?) Microsoft enabled publishing MSI/EXE applications to Microsoft Store. My question is, how isolated is the application installed via the store. Appreciate if somebody could point me to a basic article describing the store architecture related to MSI/EXE applications in the Microsoft store.

To be more specific, I am looking for answer to interoperability questions like: can an application installed via Microsoft store access windows registry? If yes, can it change the registry and will these changes be visible to other (installed) applications, (or virtualized?) Will COM/DCOM calls work? Will named pipes work?

To summarize in one question, what level of isolation is built around an MSI/EXE application installed via store, if any?

Nikolay
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  • The whole Windows Store has different sections for MSIX vs MSI/EXE in most page headers you can choose, for example. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/publish/publish-your-app/overview?pivots=store-installer-msi-exe You have no isolation with msi/exe apps since you have no package no identity, so your app may not use some modern Windows features https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/modernize/modernize-packaged-apps – Simon Mourier Jul 04 '23 at 06:45
  • @SimonMourier thank you for response. By "isolation" I mean effectively virtualization. Does store application run in a virtualized environment? For example, will **other applications** see changes my application does in windows registry? In fact, my application is an add-in for another application (that needs to register itself in the registry for another app); does this scenario work? – Nikolay Jul 04 '23 at 07:31

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