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Targets Windows
62

The intent was to have a custom document-icon for a file-type-association, which should be different to the app-icon.
Therefore the Assets and Resources.pri have to be re-built manually (the Desktop App Converter doesn’t seem capable of doing this). Anyway…

…I once mentioned that I prefer the way of the Manual Conversion (not using the Desktop App Converter, not requiring all this BaseImage-overhead).

Meanwile I’ve prepared an example Xojo project: Xojo2AppX. This example shows how a Post Build Script can be used in a Xojo project in order to create AppX Packages.

You can customize the Assets’s (replace the App/Tile-Icons) and Tile-appearance (Background Color, Short Name) by setting a couple of Variables in the Batch Script. The example also shows how to use custom FileType associations for an example filetype ‘.xojo2appx_document’.

I haven’t linked it on the main Xojo - some pieces 4u - page yet (I’ll do so later, once it has been tested a bit). But for those of you who’d like try this - please do so, and let me know how it works for you. I haven’t tested in in a “clean windows installation” yet - maybe it currently just works because of VisualStudio being installed - who knows. But I certainly don’t have the Desktop App Converter installed on this machine. But maybe what I wrote in the requirements about the to-be-selected features of Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) is not correct yet - we’ll see :slight_smile:

Still I hope this example shows how building an .appx could be implemented in a way that’s easy to use (once fully configured…) by simply clicking “build” in Xojo.

Have a look at the ReadMe.txt
You might find some more useful pieces of information which you can include in your great documentation. E.g. “How to test your App for Windows 10 S”. Or the example of the convenient way of creating all the required Tile-Images with just one click (well, if VisualStudio is installed - otherwise there probably are other ways, such as some PhotoShop-exports): UWP Tile Generator Extension for Visual Studio

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Ah, first issue with the downloaded version: The PowerShell-Script ‘SearchReplace.ps1’ may not run because of

ParentContainsErrorRecordException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : UnauthorizedAccess
Workaround seems to be: right-click the .ps1 in Windows Explorer, manually Open/Execute with PowerShell once.
From then on it seems to work when invoked via Xojo-PostScript-Build.

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@Jürg Otter

Thanks for the good work that you did creating the code. I will look at it a little closer this weekend when I have free time. :slight_smile:

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I’ve updated the Xojo2AppX Example project (v1.0.0.2) to not use a .ps1 file. This should avoid the previously mentioned execution-issues when running a downloaded version.
One might still need to allow “Windows Defender SmartScreen” to run the PostScriptBuild’s “Build_AppX.bat” Script once.

  • download, extract the .zip and build with xojo
  • Windows Defender SmartScreen pops up: click on the link about ‘more information’ (well yes, the .bat script is not codesigned)
  • click the button to ‘execute anyway’
    I hope that way the downloaded code is easier to get running than before. you no longer need to locate a sub-script and allow them first using some other way.
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I have been asked a couple of times for the most recent free installer articles. The links are buried in the previous posts and are a little difficult to find. Here are some clearer links:

I have kept the older article version and created a new article to build an appx, and you can either: 1) click on this link to get to my website where the articles are kept Build an AppX Installer for Microsoft Store with Xojo , or 2) go to my website at http://scispec.ca and click on the Books tab and search through the books to get to the articles.

Warm regards,

Eugene

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