wix3 VS Versions

For those like me (I never used Windows) who do not know WiX; https://wixtoolset.org/.

I don't do Windows installers myself, but I hear WiX is popular: https://wixtoolset.org/

I actually like WiX[1] — it has a bit of a learning curve, but, so long as I'm building on Windows and don't stray far from the default UI flows, I haven't found an easier tool for creating Windows installers as part of a product build process, especially those that require Windows-specific bits like COM component registration, Windows service management, setting restrictive ACLs on installed components, etc.

And while I'm not aware of any way to sandbox Windows Installer itself, I'm curious if AppContainer isolation can be applied to applications and services installed via MSI, which would still be quite useful even if the installation process itself is unrestricted.

Alternatively, now that MSIX supports service installation[2], I wonder whether an MSIX including a Windows service and a collection of client applications can be configured so everything runs within one AppContainer, isolated from the rest of the system, and whether permission to access specific external directories chosen by users in a configuration GUI can be transparently (to the user) delegated to the related service.

Alas, none of this is useful to me until it's compatible with at least the most recent version of Windows 10, as very few of my customers are running Windows 11, and I suspect many won't upgrade until Windows 10 is no longer supported (optimistically; as of last year, I was still getting occasional support requests from customers running older versions of our software on Windows Server 2003 R2).

[1] https://wixtoolset.org

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/supported-pla...

For Windows, in the past, I’ve used the WiX toolset to create installers (https://wixtoolset.org/).

https://wixtoolset.org/ should be able to help you out there.

Wix toolset to extract .exe to get the driver or .msi https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix3/releases

For windows - store: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-store/register/ - requirements: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/publish/publish-your-app/app-package-requirements?pivots=store-installer-msix - alternatively you can make MSIs and distribute them through your own website or another service. https://wixtoolset.org/ - publishing with chocolatey isn't a terrible option to help users with upgrade/installation automation. https://community.chocolatey.org/packages

https://wixtoolset.org/ Dont need anything else :)

I use scoop, and needed to install this separately from the versions bucket here: (https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Versions/blob/master/bucket/omnisharp-net6.json).

Scoop is maintained, but just... really slowly. It's a shame. For example it took more than a month and two maintainer pings to merge an absolutely trivial PR to add Python 3.8 (a single character change over the Python 3.7 manifest): https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Versions/pull/226

For the most part, this does not matter. Most of the existing stuff is already present in buckets and auto-updated by CI. The problem is just when something breaks or something new needs to be added, which can take a non-deterministic amount of time.