Additionally, thanks to these tools, you have the opportunity to use the same project to generate at the same time a MSI and a MSIX, helping you to support customers who might not have migrated yet to Windows 10 and who are unable to use MSIX Core (for example, because it's a consumer application). Popular authoring tools, like Advanced Installer, InstallShield or Wix, are able to generate a MSIX package out from an installer project, making easier to reuse the work you may already have done to generate MSI installers in the past. However, in many cases you may already have an installer definition created with a 3rd party tool. And thanks to features like App Installer, we can easily deploy the generated MSIX package to a website and support automatic updates without changing the code or having to setup your own service. Thanks to the Windows Application Packaging Project, we can easily automate the creation of a MSIX package simply by adding it to our solution and running a build.

If you follow my activities, like the articles I publish on this blog or the recent book I've published about MSIX, you'll know that one of the reasons why I like MSIX from a developer perspective is that it makes really easy to enable a CI/CD pipeline for Windows desktop applications.

Advanced installer project