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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.
Is this submission by app appers guy, because it reads like one.
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.
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.
I'd like to meet one of these users. I support Windows machines, and I've never had a customer mention the Windows store. Mostly they just want me to show them how to turn off the creepy stalking crap in Windows 10.
Imagine that, ANOTHER feature Linux had 20 years ago that Windows is only now getting.
Don't our Linux package managers actually have applications and useful stuff in them?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.