With, Microsoft is making it possible for developers to convert traditional Windows desktop applications to Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications. But anyone can do this with any app–not just developers.With Windows 10’s converter, just give it a.msi or.exe file and it’ll spit out a.appx package. You can then sideload this app on your own PC, or–if you’re the application’s developer–you can submit the resulting UWP app to the Windows Store. This feature will arrive for everyone with Windows 10’s Anniversary Update,. Why You’d Want to Do ThisRELATED:This feature is the end result of Microsoft’s Project Centennial, which is designed to bring those “legacy” Win32 and.NET Windows desktop applications to the Windows Store and the new Universal Windows Platform.You might wonder why anyone would want to convert a desktop application to a new UWP app. For one thing, only UWP apps are allowed in the Windows Store. This allows developers to get a lot more eyes on their apps, not to mention single-click installation, easy purchasing, and automatic updates.Microsoft’s new UWP application platform is sandboxed, but desktop apps you convert are not.
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With the numerous file-type extensions that may be on your computer, it can be difficult to determine what you need to do to view certain files. The.MSI extension is a file that acts as an installation package developed exclusively by Microsoft for the Windows format. For Mac users, this may pose a problem for viewing.MSI files. Use a file unzip tool like we described above so that the files can exist in a regular folder structure. Then, with a program like WinCDEmu installed, right-click the folder and select Build an ISO image. Another option is to convert MSI to EXE, which you can do with Ultimate MSI to EXE Converter.
These applications will have full access to your system, just like a traditional desktop application. As says: “As a UWP app, your app is able to do the things it could do as a classic desktop app. It interacts with a virtualized view of the registry and file system that’s indistinguishable from the actual registry and file system.” The LimitationsRELATED:There are some important limitations here. First, you can only do this on the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. For now, it’ll work with Windows 10 Insider Preview and higher, so you’ll need to join the Windows Insider program and.This feature also requires either the Professional or Enterprise editions of Windows 10.
Windows 10 Home users won’t be able to use the Desktop App Converter. As of build 14316, it only worked on Windows 10 Enterprise, but support for Windows 10 Professional is coming.
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Currently, this tool can only be used on 64-bit versions of Windows, and the resulting AppX package can only be installed on 64-bit versions of Windows. This will change in future Insider builds of Windows 10.The resulting applications are intended for Windows 10 PCs. They won’t work on Windows 10 Mobile smartphones, Xbox One, HoloLens, Surface Hub, and the other Windows 10 platforms that run UWP apps. However, if you’re a developer, Microsoft offers a path to getting your desktop application into a cross-platform UWP application: “If you choose to move all of your app’s functionality out of the full-trust partition of the app and into the app container partition, then your app will be able to run on any Windows 10 device.”However, some types of application behavior aren’t supported. An application can’t require it be run as Administrator or use other types of low-level system access. Microsoft provides a list of.
How to Set Up the Desktop App ConverterAssuming you’re using a new enough build of the Windows 10 Insider Preview, you can download and install the from Microsoft’s Developer site. Download both the DesktopAppConverter.zip and BaseImage-14316.wim files. Extract the downloaded DesktopAppConverter.zip file to a folder on your computer and place the BaseImage file in the same directory. (If there’s a new build of Windows 10 available, you should see a new BaseImage file. You’ll need to use the BaseImage file with the same version number as your installed build of Windows 10.)You’ll also need to download and install the.Next, open a PowerShell window as Administrator. To do so, open the Start menu, search for “PowerShell,” right-click its shortcut, and select “Run as Administrator.”Change PowerShell’s execution policy by running the following command. Agree to the change by typing y afterwards.
A MSI file is a Microsoft Installer file, similar to a package. When you double-click the file, Windows Installer extracts the files from the package, creates the necessary folders, copies the files in the folders and might also create shortcuts or registry entries, if necessary. An EXE file is an executable file. Some EXE files can be opened on a Mac computer, but only to extract their contents.
If you want to convert a MSI file to an EXE file you can use on a Mac, you must make sure the EXE file is a package, similar to the original MSI.
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