Slashdot Mirror
Desktop Apps Make Their Way Into the Windows Store (arstechnica.com)
With Windows 8, Microsoft introduced Windows Store, which consisted of "Metro / Modern UI" apps which worked best on touch capable devices. Since the release of Windows 8, many users complained that they wanted traditional apps -- the applications they had grown accustomed to -- to be included in Windows Store. This would have come in handy to especially Windows RT users, who couldn't easily get traditional applications installed on their devices. Well, guess, what, that's changing now. Though only for Windows 10 users who have gotten the Anniversary Update -- and guess what, many haven't and might not for another month and a half. At any rate, ArsTechnica elaborates: Until now, applications built for and sold through the Windows Store in Windows 10 have been built for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), the common set of APIs that spans Windows 10 across all the many devices it supports. This has left one major category of application, the traditional desktop application built using the Win32 API, behind. Announced at Build 2015, codename Project Centennial -- now officially titled the Desktop App Converter -- is Microsoft's solution to this problem. It allows developers to repackage existing Win32 applications with few or no changes and sell them through the store. Applications packaged this way aren't subject to all the sandbox restrictions that UWP applications are, ensuring that most will work unmodified. But they are also given the same kind of clean installation, upgrading, and uninstallation that we've all come to expect from Store-delivered software. Centennial is designed to provide not just a way of bringing Win32 apps into the store; it also provides a transition path so that developers can add UWP-based functionality to their old applications on a piecemeal basis. Evernote, one of the launch applications, uses UWP APIs to include support for Live Tiles and Windows' notification system. In this way, developers can create applications that work better on Windows 10 but without having to rewrite them entirely for Windows 10.
Strike that... I won't look in the Windows Store at all.
It hasn't been a cake-walk converting Zoom Player (http://zoomplayer.com) to the AppX model.
The 'Desktop Bridge' conversion tool breaks the Executable/AppData folder model introduced in Windows Vista and is completely incompatible with the Windows XP admin access model.
By this I mean that the app can't write any file to the installation folder.
And any files installed to the local AppData folder by the Win32 installer are non-accessible after the conversion to AppX (they are installed in a read-only folder where no API can be used to find the folder's path).
The work-around is to install everything to a single folder and then copy the required files to the local AppData folder on the initial run.
There are other issues dealing with the App's icon in various places, it seems they changed the model and it's impossible (as far as I can tell and as far as my questions get non-answers on the microsoft UWP forum) to present the same icon as a desktop app on the start menu, task bar and elsewhere.
I also found that some 3rd party components (DirectShow filters) don't always work in the virtualized environment, but it's something I'm trying to resolve with the authors.
And finally, there is no clear process to get a store listing for the App.
We filled in the form, got no reply that it was even received, later follow-ups on the MS forum resulting in this:
https://social.msdn.microsoft....
Hopefully they will streamline the process soon.
Zoom Player Lead Dev.
I have a local login for my Windows 10 machine
I remembered that I actually still have a subscription to the MLB tv app. Ok I thought, I guess I should use the app store thing which required logging into my Windows account, ok, no problem.
Had to reboot for some patch install a few days later... long story short they change your login profile from local to Windows without telling you
I was able to set it back up but I absolutely do not trust the Windows store at all now, that kind of garbage is NOT acceptable.
This would've been of little or no use to Windows RT devices. Aside from the fact they're too small to run Win32 applications well, practically all of those desktop apps are for x86, and Windows RT is Arm based. That's why Windows RT users couldn't get traditional apps. I don't think being able to sell them through the store would be likely to convince any developers to go to the trouble of reworking and recompiling for Arm, and then supporting that additional platform as well.
IMHO - This is long overdue for Windows on desktop, laptop and tablet. The sooner we can encourage people to get apps through the store the better, as the more controlled system will cut down on the likelihood that users will get unwanted crapware, malware, adware and wareware with the software they intend to install. We need to put a stop to this whole industry based around duping users into installing bundled rubbish (hell, even Oracle and Adobe are guilty of it).
Anyway, that's my 2c.
L8r.