AdminStudio 2022 R2 brings lots of great MSIX support enhancements and takes a big step toward helping you maximize your investment in Azure.
Now You Can Host Your AdminStudio Application Catalog on Azure SQL
In an effort to help our customers leverage their investment in cloud infrastructure, you can now create and host the AdminStudio application catalog on Azure SQL.
MSIX Editor Enhancements
MSIX has been steadily gaining popularity as it overcomes more and more of its initial limitations. AdminStudio continues to enhance support for MSIX to enable you to smoothly migrate to MSIX from your legacy installers. While MSIX brings some new concepts and complexities, we feel it is the role of AdminStudio to make things easier to use. To that end, we are pleased to announce the following enhancements in this release of AdminStudio:
Support for new PSF Fixups
While some scenarios where runtime errors may occur when running as a converted MSIX package, the Package Support Framework (PSF) fixups provide a way to resolve some of the most common such failures. In this release of AdminStudio, we have simplified support for many by providing a simple and intuitive user interface to help you easily apply fixups to an MSIX package. The new fixups include:
- File Not Found Fixup
File Not Found fixup is applied to an application when a file is not found by the application at runtime. This fixup requires the working directory of the file, that will be automatically populated in this fixup’s configuration.
- Registry Fixup
There are two types of Registry Fixups: Modify Access and Fake Delete. Some applications may request more permissions than they need while interacting with the Windows registry. Such requests may sometimes be denied for an application running in an MSIX container thus failing the subsequent registry actions. The Modify Access Registry Fixup allows you to modify the requested access level to a lower level to return success which otherwise would have failed. The Fake Delete Registry Fixup returns a fake success to a registry delete request made by an application to make it believe that the registry was deleted.
- Environment Variable Fixup
The Environment Variables Fixup allows you to specify an application-specific scope environment variable to be read or modified by application in an MSIX package.
- Executable Arguments Fixup
MSIX packages inherently do not support passing of arguments to an executable (.exe) while launching an application shortcut. To pass arguments to an executable you may apply an Executable Arguments fixup to the application.
PSF Fixups Suggestions
Because applications running from an MSIX package run in a virtual container, it can be prone to runtime failures. Some failures may crash the application while some others may silently fail in the background resulting in an undesired behavior or errors. PSF fixups can resolve some of these commonly seen runtime failures, but implementing them can be challenging as you as a packager, struggle to answer the following questions:
- How do you know what runtime failures were encountered by an MSIX packages?
- which fixup must be applied to fix these runtime failures?
This enhancement will help you find answers to these questions easily. The tracing capability in the MSIX Editor has been enhanced to monitor the trace logs and identify runtime failures so it can suggest fixups to resolve the failures. After tracing, recommended fixups to resolve runtime failure can be seen in the new Recommended Fixups view. Simply choose those you’d like and click “Apply Recommended Fixups” to have such added to your MSIX package. This ability to recommend fixups has been implemented for both the File Redirection and Registry fixups.
Create Non-EXE applications in MSIX
Applications in MSIX are akin to shortcuts in MSI. MSIX has a limitation that prevents you from creating an application that points to a non-exe file. However, in AdminStudio’s updated MSIX Editor you can create such applications (shortcuts). With this enhancement, MSIX can now support creating shortcuts for .bat, .txt, .cmd .HTML, and .docx files.
Edit Visual Assets
The Visual Assets view of the MSIX Editor is now editable. Visual Assets comprise of different tile sizes, application icons, package logos, splash screens and badge logo images. MSIX installed applications present themselves on a Windows machine through these visual assets, for example as tiles and/or application icon on the start menu. The Visual Assets view enables you to view, edit and generate a new set of visual assets for an MSIX package.
Automate Package Feed Module Trial packages
Package Feed Module gives you access to downloads, tested and validated silent command-line switches, and customization options for more than 4,000 third-party installers. Since being introduced, we have included a handful of free installers you can use for free. In this enhancement, the trial packages have been added to the Backlog tab in AdminStudio so you may subscribe to these trial packages for automation. Now you can fully experience the power of package automation in AdminStudio for the applications listed below.
- Chrome for Business
- Adobe Reader DC
- Notepad++
- 7-Zip
- UltraEdit
To see full release notes, click here.
