Migrating from Win32 to Packaged (and/or Packaged with identity).

[denelon]

WinGet can install both "packaged"(MSIX) and "unpackaged" (Win32) applications (packages in the package manager vernacular). Unfortunately, the differences between packaged and unpackaged applications means WinGet doesn't have an ability to gracefully "upgrade" an unpackaged application to a packaged one. This hit PowerShell 7 multiple times.

I'd like to start working towards a graceful migration story. There is a lot of complexity to unpack here. We need to come up with and share some solid guidance with reasons why a developer may need or want to migrate and provide customers with the best experience possible.

One of the topics in this discussion is also related to granting "identity" to an application.
https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/apps/desktop/modernize/grant-identity-to-nonpackaged-apps

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Related to:

• Well behaved installers #2110

[denelon]

My current thinking is that we need to provide some kind of logical "flow chart"/"decision matrix" to help developers reason about what type of an installer/package they should build with caveats and constraints that will lead them to be successful. The related discussion above was an intent to start thinking more crisply about various installer toolchains and what a developer should do to make sure their application installation and uninstallation is "well behaved".

One of the documents that has influenced my thinking is the 8 Laws of Software Installation

The WinGet documentation at Microsoft Learn is under the Windows Development Environment. Given that is the landing page for developers to go to learn about Microsoft Developer Tools and development paths, I was thinking this content could live under the "More tools and resources" section.

Initially, I'd like to bootstrap the content with links to other parts of Microsoft Learn related to MSI and MSIX and over time augment with more details and decision-making criteria.

I don't believe there is a "one size fits all" solution, and there are likely going to be many "right" solutions. I want to make sure we clearly articulate the value proposition for updating installers, migrating to different toolchains, and we include the various pros and cons to any approach.