Why is it that even though I have the build setting in Visual Studio set to Release everything I create within a side-loaded UWP distribution is placed within a folder with _test on the end? Is it because MS assumes a side-loaded app is always a test app?
I place my appxbundle files within AppCenter and I'm using AppCenter to distrubute our internal production apps to our internal employess using AppCenter.
Here is the main reason I'm even asking. I have tried to publish an appxbundle to the AppCenter for my employees to download and install. Problem is, these target laptops don't have the Microsoft Store installed (don't ask) so the appxbundle won't auto-install. So, when I try to install via a powershell script I can clearly see that the dependency for Microsoft.NET.Native.Runtime.2.0 isn't being met and the install fails. When I extract the appxbundle for my app I see no dependencies are included. But, if I explore the root folder that my app is published to, I can find the Microsoft.NET.Native.Runtime.2.0 is there, it's just not making it into the appxbundle file. In order to install this app on these laptops I have to enable developer mode, I have to zip up the entire published folder, send this zip file to the user, have them extract it, then have them run the powershell script within the root folder. This powershell script installs my appxbundle, cert, and includes all dependencies.
I read HERE the following:
App Center always generates an app bundle. However, Debug builds are
not meant to be used for sideloading. ...and the provided .appxbundle
files in the Test folder do not contain required dependencies.
Since my dependencies are not included within the appxbundle and based on what Microsoft said, it appears my app is being generated as a Debug build even though I'm selecting Release within my IDE before publishing.
Sadly it's hard-coded in the msbuild file "Microsoft.AppxPackage.Targets"
Location for VS2019 C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Enterprise\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v16.0\AppxPackage\Microsoft.AppxPackage.Targets
Or as MSFT UWP Engineer Nico Zhu said in the comments: "it is by design"
See also: Customizing Visual Studio MSIX packaging project output
Related
I am new to Xamarin and am trying to publish my application as a side loading package. I use VS2019 to publish the UWP application. The problem I have is that the AppInstaller file that Publish generates contains explicit references to folders on my computer. This, of course, works on my computer, but does not on anyone elses' computer. Here is an example from the AppInstaller file:
Uri="file:///c:/SpectrumApp/SpectrumApp.UWP.appinstaller"
I can write a powershell script to modify the App Installer file to contain the correct file path for a given system, but that seems like a workaround to some basic thing that I am doing wrong with the Publish capability built into VS2019.
I have a UWP application. I can run it inside of Visual Studio by using the Run button. I also know how to create an App Package and distributed it via App Center.
What I can't figure out how to do is build an EXE file that I can run on my own computer without launching Visual Studio (or copy to another computer). I found the EXE in the project folder under bin/x64/Debug (or bin/x64/Release), but it won't run. In fact it does nothing when I double-click on it.
What am I doing wrong?
The easiest way I have found to get apps installed on computers for non-technical users is to give them the output of that Create App Packages submenu, which includes a ps1 script and certificate file. If you give it to them as a zip make sure they unzip the whole folder first, and run the ps1 script from the unzipped folder. If Developer Mode is not enabled on their computer, the settings dialog to enable it will open automatically, and they just have to flip the switch. Otherwise, they are just pressing Y or A in the PowerShell window to continue through the installation process.
It's not too bad, the whole thing takes about 30 seconds if you breeze through it, but I believe you need admin rights on the computer you're installing on, there's a UAC prompt at some point.
I found the EXE in the project folder under bin/x64/Debug (or bin/x64/Release)
The exe file is the uwp executive core, but it could not run directly, because it has some dependencies need to be packed together, so we need use Visual Studio to create package for your app. And this document contains detailed steps you could refer.
After getting the installation package, we need the side-load, and please note:
If you are not publishing your app and simply want to sideload an app package, you first need to trust the package. To trust the package, the certificate must be installed on the user's device.
Short version of the problem:
I'm having difficulties including the assemblies my .NET Core Console App depends on.
Initially, the assemblies from NuGet packages were not included in the bin folder even though I could run the app in Debug mode without any problems.
Found an article that suggested that I should add <CopyLocalLockFileAssemblies>true</CopyLocalLockFileAssemblies> in the myapp.csproj file which I did.
Doing so included the dll files for the NuGet packages in the bin folder BUT after I copied my console app to Azure to run as a WebJob, I got an error telling me that System.Data.SqlClient was missing.
After inspecting the folder where the WebJob runs, I could see that the dll for System.Data.SqlClient is actually in the folder. I concluded that it may have been an issue with version numbers. The error indicated the following:
'System.Data.SqlClient', version: '4.4.2' was not found
When I right click the dll file for this assembly and check its version, it shows version 4.6.
Any idea how to resolve this issue?
Longer Version:
I built this .NET Core 2.0 console app to run as a WebJob following this article: http://matt-roberts.me/azure-webjobs-in-net-core-2-with-di-and-configuration/
I had to create this WebJobs app manually because currently Visual Studio does not provide a way to build Azure WebJobs in .NET Core.
Because of this current limitation, I also could not Publish my WebJobs app directly from Visual Studio.
So, I tried to zip it up and upload it through Azure Portal. This is when I realized that NuGet assemblies were not included in the bin folder. The rest of the story is already up in the "Short Version" section.
I'd appreciate some suggestion in solving this issue.
UPDATE:
When I ran dotnet publish --self-contained -r win32-x64 -c Release inside the project's root folder, I got the following error:
Not quite sure of the WebJobs specification, but you should be able to use dotnet publish --self-contained -r win-x64 -c Release to generate executable and its dependencies. Zip them up and you should be able to deploy to Azure.
There is really no need to modify your csproj like you did.
Besides, you can use .NET IL Linker to shrink the size of the generated folder.
Reference
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/deploy-with-cli#self-contained-deployment-with-third-party-dependencies
I'm getting this error when building my Multi-Device Hybrid App.
EXEC : error : EBUSY, resource busy or locked 'C:\path\to\project\bld\Debug\www\.svn\wc.db'
Suspected cause:
From what I can gather, when the Multi-Device Hybrid Apps Visual Studio extension builds the app it seems to grab all files in the project directory (except for some specific files/folders e.g. bld/bin directories and the .jsproj file) and add them to the package. That's ok, but not ideal, it really should only be grabbing the files in the VS project. The problem I'm experiencing is becuase it's grabbing my SVN .db file and adding it to the package, TortoiseSVN status cache then picks up this file and locks it - resulting in my error.
This is my specific issue, but I believe others could experience similar issues if they have any other files in the directory that they don't want included in the app bundle. I'd suggest it could be fixed by somehow setting excluded files/folders from the build or by the build script not grabbing everything, only those files included in the visual studio project. I'm not sure how to request that, so hopefully the developers will see this post...
So, my question is: Does anyone know of any way to tell the Multi-Device Hybrid Apps Visual Studio extension build process (or vs-mda\vs-cli) to ignore certain files or folders?
Or, does anyone have any suggestions as to how to make SVN and this VS extension play nice?
Unfortunately Visual Studio includes all the files under project directory except bin\bld folder. Currently only simple workaround would be to keep the files which you want to be excluded from package outside project directory. You can add the file to solution explorer by using Add --> Existing Item --> Add as link in case you want the file to appear in solution explorer but not included for build or packaging.
it seems folder with test as its name will be considered differently, and it will be excluded from package.
When I publish my console app I get three files:
Application Files (Folder)
ClickOnce Application
setup
There has to be a way that gives me just a .exe that has everything the app needs to run within in.
I'm using Visual Studio 2010, and don't see any obvious options that would allow me to do this.
Note: Using the setup file appears to just make a shortcut to the ClickOnce Application that I already have.
Look in the bin directory of the application, it should have published an executable for you.