How to create an MSIX application package

[Music] hello and for today's video we're going to talk about how to create an msix application package what is msix you might ask msix is microsoft's new entry into application packaging it's intended to be the de facto standard for packaging up your windows applications in a simple and modular and user-centric way under the hood it's a bit of a blend of fs logics and appv as i said it's intended to be very simple and easy to use only time will tell how easy it is actually to use in the real world when it gets deployed all those typical applications but there's certainly a lot of promise and a lot of noise about it coming out of microsoft so something we're going to say a lot of whether it's successful or not i guess and the purpose of this video is to just show you how to create a simple msix application package we're not getting into msix attach yet we'll cover that in a separate video this is just how to create a basic msix package and deploy it to your users now there's a couple of things you need to do before we start creating an msix application package main one thing is to get ourselves a packaging machine right this is basically a clean machine that we do the package capture on sometimes it's called a sequencer we're going to call it a packaging machine and what happens is you restore it to a clean state before you start creating any application packages now obviously the best thing to do for this would be to use a virtual machine so if you've got any kind of hypervisor type of v on windows 10 would do it spin yourself up a virtual machine now what you also need to do on this machine is you need to install the msix packaging tool it is available quite easily you just go to google type in msix packaging tool as we're showing here and download it from the windows store now the easiest way to do this is to install the msix packaging tool onto your virtual machine that you use for packaging if you do it that way remember that the windows packaging machine the vm has to be windows 10 version 18 or 9 or higher if you want to do the packaging on an older operating system what you'll need to do is install the packaging tool on a separate machine so a windows 10 1800 or higher and then connect remotely to the packaging machine but the easiest way really is to have your packaging machine with the msix packaging tool installed directly on it don't want to make it too complicated now once you've got your packaging machine and you've installed the operating system on the vm and you've got all your patches installed and you've got the msix packaging tool there as well don't install any other software on there at all don't even install anything like antivirus software it's very important to keep it as clean as possible so that we only capture the application that we're looking to capture nothing else gets captured along with it once you've done that once you've got all the patches installed and the os installed and then packaging tool installed you need to create a snapshot of that machine so you can roll back to it afterwards once you've done your application packaging so if like me you're on height of a you do it like this where by taking taking a checkpoint of the machine whatever virtual machine technology you're using will have its own way of creating a snapshot so make sure you get that done so as i said just a quick rundown of that install yourself a packaging vm install all of the patches install the msix packaging tool make sure there's no other software on there take a snapshot and then you'll be ready to start the capture process so to get dealt with how do we actually create the msix application package first thing you need to do is obviously log on to your packaging machine and then what we need to do is actually get the software now i'm assuming you've got the actual software the source files that you want to install whether in msi and execute whatever you may have them in a repository you may have them have to download them from an online source if you don't have source files or if you just have things like app v packages or things like that we can convert those to msix as well we'll be discussing how to do that in a later video but for now let's just assume we actually have the source files so i'm going to go to an online repository that i have of my source files and just grab them from there and copy them down to the local packaging machine obviously because we've taken a snapshot beforehand and we're going to revert to the snapshot when we're finished this means you don't have to worry about copying files to the local machine because they're going to get wiped out as soon as you restore back to that snapshot so let's just take as an example we'll use this one which is virtual danger let's just copy that across to the packaging machine and then we can use it right so next what we need to do is actually run the msix packaging tool that we installed as part of our prerequisites it needs admin access so make sure you've actually got them it's always a good thing you can choose to accept or decline diagnostic data then you get these three options here we're creating a new application package so click on the first of those buttons to create a new application package right as i mentioned earlier you can either create the package on this computer which is the way i'd recommend to do it you connect to a remote machine or even a local virtual machine using hyper-v obviously if you want to package on older os's we'll show you in a later video how to use some of the second options but right for now the easiest way is to simply create the package on this computer now when you click on next here what it will do is actually do some pre-flight checks it'll check if the microsoft packaging the msix packaging tool driver is installed it'll disable windows update because you don't want windows update running in the background and updating things and downloading files while you're trying to capture that and it will also come up with some other recommendations as well that you can optionally select so it's a packaging tool drive is installed it's disabled windows update for us and we can also choose to do the recommended actions which is disabling windows search and then click on next now first of all what you need to do is actually choose the installer that you want to package so i've put this on the desktop so we'll just insert that in there you can put in any installer arguments option there now next we come to signing now when you deploy msix packages to machines it's important to sign them you don't want the users in installing unsigned packages you can choose to sign up with device guard but that means signing in with microsoft or you can just use a pfx certificate file you create earlier i would always recommend actually make sure it's signed and obviously that certificate has to be on the machines that are going to run this we'll talk about ways of deploying that now you could use a self science certificate or something like that but we've already created one earlier and i'll just browse to where it's located in this pyjama folder and we'll just select our certificate there we have a password with that make sure that's in as well and just click on next now it's also important to fill in all the relevant details down here if i can get the right bit for the publisher give it whatever name you want to put in there package name the display name put the publisher name in there and give it a version this one's actually pulled the properties from the actual file so let's put the version in there another thing to do is if you're delivering it to machines that are windows 7 and above older operating systems you choose to take this box to add support for msix core i generally do that because i often end up doing packages for older machines once you've done that click on next and it will actually launch the installer if you're familiar with app v you're probably pretty familiar with the way that it's doing it through this packaging tool here so you can go to the advanced options and choose whatever you need well i don't need to do any of that we're just going to click install right now as it installs it's going to capture all of the changes to the machine and wrap them up into an msix file right you can see that it's finished doing install now if you needed a restart at this point you can click restart machine and will reboot and then relaunch the package editor afterwards we don't need to do that now what you need to do is actually do a first run of the applications now this say you're supposed to be able to run it from here by right-clicking and choosing run well that doesn't actually work so what you'll need to do is actually just run it directly from the shortcuts either on the desktop or in the start menu make sure it's run for the first time there's nothing for us to configure here so let's just make sure it runs okay and then we shall just quite simply close it down switch back to the packaging tool and then click next now it's going to stop listening for the capture now so you're asked to confirm so click yes move on now it starts preparing your package just give it a minute here to finish there's no services in there so that's good click on next and then you've got to choose where you'd like to serve it i'm going to save it into that packages folder that we went into earlier so let's just bang it in there and let's give it a name of virtual dj let's just click on save there you can edit the page here now we're all done let's click create and let it go off and create our msix package and that's it it's done you can choose to edit it further now if you want to or you can simply click close and it'll clean up the environment after itself and the package is actually fully created and right now we're done with our signature machine our packaging machine and we can go and roll that back to a snapshot to ensure it's ready for the next application we want the package now how is easy is it to deploy this msix package we've just created to another machine now if we switch back to this machine here which is my main windows 10 desktop and have a look down through the start menu here you can see under v there is no mention of anything for v virtual dj is not installed right well let's actually just browse across to that repository that we set up and have a look for the virtual dj package just drag this over here we scroll down the bottom here see the msix files are here there's virtual dj if we simply right click on that and choose install you know let's see over here gives the option to install virtual digit it tells the user that it's signed by a publisher now simply click install on here it will run through and do the installation directly on to my machine so now if we look in the start menu here you can see right at the top virtual dj 2021 and if i now choose to launch it it's always going to launch on the wrong screen we got at long last and now we say that it's running perfectly on this machine and it's even enumerating all of my music into that as well and that's how easy it is to install and when it comes to uninstalling you just simply need to go into the apps section over here and find virtual dj in this list which will be there somewhere right there choose uninstall and the package is now removed it's that easy for the user to find an app that you've created in msx package install it and uninstall it for themselves now there are smart ways you can deploy these things automatically onto machines based on user script memberships well that's something that we'll cover in another video but there you go just for now that's how easy it is to install uh to create an msix application package and that's how easy it is to deploy it to your users machines

Channel: James Rankin

Views: 149

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Id: crJyPhl802Q

Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 03 2021