Showing archive results for June 2026

MSIX supports making a package available to all users; the formal term is provisioning. Provisioning a package family makes it available to all users, whereas registration makes a package available to a single user. Per-User vs All Users Traditional installers often provide a "per-machine" installation mode to make software available to all users...

As previously mentioned to 'install' a package, as people think of the term, Windows actually performs two separate operations: staging and registration. To oversimplify: One way to 'install' a package for a user is to explicitly stage it, then register the package: But this scenario is common enough that deployment handles it more effici...

MSIX has several core principles underlying its design and implementation. Engineers half-jokingly call these The Rules of MSIX. The Third Rule of MSIX is arguably the most important and certainly the most foundational: Package identity is unique across space and time Packageidentity is a unique identifier corresponding to a specific set of b...

"Disk space optimizations" is one of the key features of MSIX: Disk space optimizations. With MSIX there is no duplication of files across apps and Windows manages the shared files across apps. The apps are still independent of each other so updates will not impact other apps that share the file. But how does MSIX accomplish this? Every pac...

A key phase in installing a package is staging the package: When a package is staged for the first time, deployment performs several actions, including: Deployment secures these directories with strict permissions, typically granting users Read and potentially Execute access - but notably not Write access. This ensures one user cannot ...