Discovering application packaging and MSIX basics
For most of this book, we have been building and running our applications locally. We have touched on some packaging concepts in Chapter 8, Building WinUI Apps with .NET 5, and deployment with App Center in Chapter 13, Building, Releasing, and Monitoring Applications with Visual Studio App Center. Now, it's time to build on those concepts and gain a deeper understanding of packaging and deploying WinUI applications.
Why package your application? Well, an application package is currently required for WinUI applications to be installed in Windows. This requirement will likely change as Project Reunion and WinUI applications evolve. Today, when you run a WinUI project in Visual Studio, the integrated development environment (IDE) creates a package and deploys it locally. Packaging serves several other important purposes, outlined as follows:
- Providing a clean uninstall: A packaging system ensures that any files installed...