MSIX Modern Packaging – Part 1

Introduction

If you are working with system management, you also come across applications that need to be mass deployed to your endpoints. Before that can happen the vendor either deliver unattended parameters to their installation process or they deliver another installation format like MSI or MSIX.

Every business can benefit from standardizing software deployment and here I will try to help you start doing that.

By going through these steps, you will have a basic setup to start building MSIX packages.

I recommend to read the fundamentals of MSIX which can be downloaded here. Tim Mangan, Bogdan Mitrache and Kevin Kaminski did an excellent job.

 

Requirements

• Hyper-V
• Minimum 8GB RAM
• 50GB free HDD
• 2GHZ processor

 

Setup your LAB

Install Hyper-V

Right click your StartMenu

 

Open PowerShell with admin rights

Paste this command to the PowerShell console

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V -All

Restart if needed

 

Start Hyper-v

Right click your environment and click “Quick Create”

 

    

Choose MSIX Packaging Tool Environment

 

 

Create Virtual Machine

It will start download ~ 5.6 gb

 

Start your newly imported MSIX Packaging Tool Environment

 

Let the virtual machine configure and wait for OOBE to kick in. Make sure your Hyper-V is connected to the internet and when you reach this screen choose Domain join instead:

 

Add a username and click next

 

Type a password and click next

 

Retype your password and click next

 

Go through the questions and click next (I’ll skip the next couple of questions)

 

Don’t use online speech recognition and click accept

 

Choose No and click Accept

 

If your virtual machine get lost, this feature isn’t going to help you click accept

 

Send required diagnostic data click accept

 

Say NO and click accept

 

Say NO and click accept

 

Say No and click accept

 

The virtual machine will logon and you will have all the resources you need to get started.

 

Start the packaging tool

 

Click yes

 

Accept

 

Open the application package. (we do that because we need to install MSIX packaging Tool Driver.)

 

Choose Create package on this computer

 

Now that we got the tool installed, we cancel the packaging process

 

Let’s configure the virtual machine for better and cleaner packages

Run commandline: Services.msc

Disable Windows Search

Disable Windows update

 

For better startup performance stop all unnecessary apps that start with windows

Start task Manager

 

Restart the virtual machine and log back into it.

Create snapshot

 

Give it a name and click yes

 

Summary

By now you should be familiar with your new packaging virtual machine. It is best practice to build packages on a clean machine where we can roll back and have a clean state every time we need to package.

Stay tuned for part 2 where I will cover how to obtain the certificate we will need for signing our applications.