Microsoft Desktop Bridge opens, Win32 apps can now cross into Windows Store Microsoft has revealed that its Desktop Bridge is open, meaning Win32 apps can now be packaged for consumption on the Windows Store and on anything that runs Windows 10. At present, only code that conforms to the strictures of the Universal Windows Platform are permitted into the Store. The significance of the Bridge's opening …
"In that users have a better chance of installing what they want compared to the chance of hitting the wrong button marked 'download' on some software listing sites."
Well, if someone hits the wrong button on a download site, they might get adware or other PUPs (potentially unwanted programs, often called crapware). If you install Windows 10, you already have adware and crapware, and unlike the download sites, there's no way to find the "direct download" link and to avoid the crapware completely.
To my mind, it's a step in the right direction. It means the software can be made easy to discover and install, and with a minimum of risk provided you trust the curator of the software repositories you use.
There are a lot of things wrong with the Windows Store however. Just as there are a lot of things wrong with the way Apple do it, and Google. apt on Debian has some good ideas, but its interface is far from ideal for computer novices.
One of the things that is a real barrier to adoption of the Windows Store is that it's only available on Windows 8 and 10. There is no technical reason why the concept couldn't be backported all the way back to Windows 95 if need be, but they choose to restrict it to their latest OSes, not the versions that people are most willing to run.
If most of a software dev's user base is on Windows 7, why would they waste money chasing the Windows Store? That is their biggest failing, the other being that, like their contemporaries, they seem to think that they should have absolute control.
Ubuntu's PPAs (and the Red Hat equivalents) aren't perfect, but it at least democratises the notion of package repositories. I think the concept could be made easy to use, provide opportunity for paid licensing of commercial software, and work well with the Microsoft ecosystem, but they're too interested in corralling users into using software and services they aren't interested in to listen.
Adoption of Windows 10 is increasing and Windows 7 will start to die off. The whole "Nobody is going to move to Windows 8/10" is fallacious. A lot of folk said the same thing when Microsoft was moving away from XP, now those same people are making fun of people clinging to XP.
People and organizations are going to be switching to Windows 10 (or its successor) as machines need to be replaced. Windows 7 doesn't natively support USB 3.0, NVMe, or PCIe 4, so it'll become necessary to use a newer OS (Ubuntu and the vast majority of Linux distros from 2008-2010 don't either)
When Ubuntu started supporting USB3, the drivers weren't back-ported to the LTS releases, and neither was the Unity interface crap, so why should Microsoft do things any differently?
"When Ubuntu started supporting USB3, the drivers weren't back-ported to the LTS releases, and neither was the Unity interface crap, so why should Microsoft do things any differently?"
Because Ubuntu will product a new LTS release within a year or two and won't charge you for it when it arrives. Unless you are bursting for USB3 support (and LTS fans probably aren't) you can just wait. Even if you are bursting, it is possible to upgrade your kernel to one that does USB3 without dragging the applications up to the bleeding edge. (Imagine that, Microsoft, upgrading to the Win10 kernel but keeping the user-space portion unchanged from the one you trust rather than being forced to hoover up a truck-load of fresh bugs. What silly ideas these penguinistas have!)
Ubuntu and the vast majority of Linux distros from 2008-2010 don't either
It isn't rocket science though to enable such support. Not in the capabilities of a computer novice, sure, but it's more doable on Linux than you'd think.
As for the Unity interface, some would say that was a blessing.
The sorts of apps that are listed on "some software listing site" are generally (exclusively?) freebies. (That's "free, whether the original author had that in mind or not".) Such things *might* have a champion who is willing to repackage them for the Store and sign for them (I presume everything in the Store has to be signed) but since there is no money involved I would doubt it.
On the other hand, MS are now offering a way to foist malware (if you can get it past the censors) onto the entire Desktop-Windows-using community via a "trusted" platform. The cost to the developer of meeting Store requirements is probably much less than a really nice piece of malware might make in return, so the incentive is there.
Obviously, the harder MS make it to push malware into the Store, the more likely that they make it harder for small ISVs to get their stuff on, too. Those champions I mentioned in my first paragraph may have their work cut out even if they exist.
> Such things *might* have a champion who is willing to repackage them for the Store and sign for them (I presume everything in the Store has to be signed) but since there is no money involved I would doubt it
Lots of people spend considerable time and effort making things available for free, via lots of sources, including various app stores. I am often impressed and pleased at the dedication of those people. Obviously some use advertising to get money but I see lots that is pretty altruistic in nature.
Many 'free' apps support other systems, pieces of hardware etc. Many have in-app purchases, which the store supports very well, naturally (as well as probably being the safest place to get an app that will charge you at some point).
TBH, I would prefer to use the store to gain Win32 apps too, for all reasons given in the video (I agree with the dev guy - having apps re-appear when creating accounts on new machines is just very, very useful) as well as the 'instant' clean removal that comes as part and parcel of the system.
People keep banging on about how phones (Android especially) all slow down and become like treacle etc. as apps clutter up the device. I see absolutely none of that and I am on my 4th WinPhone (yes, they are all still operating, in someone's hands, except the first which is a backup unit in case of loss etc. while travelling).
As an example, my better half had to complete a complex report for a Project and her laptop had a catastrophic Hard Drive issue with bad blocks and blue screens all over the place.
While I re-imaged the drive from a backup, I said 'use my laptop' and created an account. She logged in and Office was available to her immediately (didn't even use any extra disc space from what I could see).
Since all her work was on OneDrive, it just appeared locally over time (that did use 50GB of space but there is 700GB left thanks to the fabulously large drives installed these days). She accessed the docs she needed and got straight to work with a minimal delay overall.
She also now has another offline backup in case of internet loss or OneDrive missing-ness.
These are useful things and I am a fan (obviously).
I loved Windows 7, I really did. It was solid and looked good although I upgraded early mainly because the Wi-Fi on my aging laptop was not as solid as I liked.
But a new-secondhand laptop, with a touch screen and higher def etc. means it works better with Windows 10, especially as my phone runs the same UWP apps, making it much easier to use Word or Skype etc. on the phone too. Sometimes touching the screen is just very useful, even on a laptop - not to mention being able to draw directly on web pages and share the result.
It is so useful to receive a text message, have it displayed on the laptop by Cortana and then be able to reply from the laptop using a proper keyboard, without much interruption to work or play, in the notification slidy window thing, without even retrieving the phone from my pocket. This is the sort of thing you get when you allow use of the cloud etc.
And I couldn't give two shits if someone were to read the damn messages.
Now, if they would just put back that massively useful feature where all the tabs from my desktop were on the phone too...
To be seen if they vet the apps, if it's a store ala Android and history has told us that it is so ... all the fake apps etc ... we will see. Let us see if apps get bundled with toolbars, search hijackers etc in the store, we already know that all the Microsoft apps in the store have search hijackers ...
I should really stop given the guyz over in Redmond ideas.
Everything I do with Microsoft these days seems to highlight the lack of someone like Bill Gates checking up on what they are doing and saying "This is not good enough".
They just can't make their stuff work together.
I downloaded this program and ran it and more examples hit me:
It requires me to go to a web page but the link is not clickable.
The text is not selectable, so I have to type it in.
At that link I have to "obtain the base image matching your host operating system". There is a list of three, which one matches best is unknown to me.
It is a 3GB download, no torrent to save them bandwidth.
It's a Command Line application ! Cos "GUI is hard" ?!
Not. Joined. Up.
... What are they going to do to push them two UWPise their app and move onto phones, Xbox, and HoloLens?
I guess for most developers it's just not worth it, especially when they till need to get it certified if they're publishing to Xbox.
"I suspect that delivering software outside the store is about to get frowned on. "
or WORSE, _OUTRIGHT_ _DENIED_ or _BLOCKED_!!!
at least Android has a 'developer mode' _AND_ a "untrusted sources" selection. So if you build an APK for some custom thing, you can publish it yourself without paying THE TOLL.
If Micro-shaft does THAT (i.e. FORCE you to go through "the store" to publish an EXE) I'm going to stop subscribing to MSDN.
And I've been an MSDN subscriber since the 90's.
I must admit I still don't really understand what the difference is between an 'app' anda 'program'.
Howver, be that as it may, I suspect there are many people (like me) who aren't really worried by this brave new vision. The different sorts of hardware are aimed at different use cases, even if they run the same OS. A program running on a phone needs to have a very different UI to one on a desktop. frinstance, I'm running a 15 year old copy of Paintshop Pro on my Win 10 laptop. Works just fine. Even if I could bundle that to run on a phone I really, really can't see me wanting to do complex graphic editing with my fat little finger on a 5 inch screen!
By and large the things I do on my phone or tablet are not the same as the things I do on my desktop. Yes, there is some overlap, but this isn't going to change the world (or save microsoft!)
"I must admit I still don't really understand what the difference is between an 'app' anda 'program'."
app: short for 'application', what micro-shaft (and now Apple) call "a program for a phone". Or in Micro-shaft's case, an application for a desktop, too.
I like to distinguish an 'APP' from 'Application' as "an application that does some trivial thing with a phone-like interface" vs "something you can REALLY get work done with"
And of course I normally write 'app' as [CR]app because THAT is what MOST of them seem to be...
In fact, Desktop Bridge does nothing of itself to extend the range of devices on which a Win32 app can run. It provides some packaging to allow the app into the Windows Store and it allows it to peek into the UWP world by automatically adding things like live tile support.
However, the app will still run only on a Win32 platform. In Microsoft's words, it "enables the path to gradually migrate the app or game to reach all Windows 10 devices over time" and "once all functionality moves from the full-trust portion of your app and into the app container portion, your app will be able to reach every Windows device". In other words, you still have to rewrite your app to use UWP exclusively before it's a "Universal" app (duh!), the only benefit of Desktop Bridge is that you can have an app that's partly Win32 and partly UWP for a transitional period.
I would imagine that very few application developers will see the benefit of substantially rewriting desktop software so it can run on "phones, Xbox One and HoloLens". And as has been proven by the generally poor user experience of phone apps that struggle to scale up successfully to tablets, never mind Android desktops and the like, it's extremely hard to write software that adapts to a wide range of display sizes, aspect ratios and input devices and you can't easily achieve it by starting with something that was designed with none of those considerations in mind.
You do realize that the anniversary update re-installs the store (along with a few other crapware bits) and makes it non-removable with Remove-AppxPackage from the powershell command prompt?
If anybody here knows of a way to remove/fully disable the appstore on a non-enterprise version of Windows X, I am all ears.
I've had no time to bother with the anniversary update and my "metered" connection won't let it slip through, so I can's say if preemptive registry permissions blocks I've applied will hold or not (including number of restricted firewall rules MS created themselves that I tweaked into my favor). The problem is that this cat and mouse game is not worth the Windows 10 experience.
I bet that any half-decent start menu replacement (like startisback) would make for clean and customizable interface but system's foundation will remain compromised and can't be trusted without countless hours spent on analyzing network traffic (that's likely encrypted).
And in general, MS idea of what's right for me (and the amount of traffic this generates) does not fit into my "broadband" connection. 550MB per cumulative security update, really (blobs that can be picked from MS update catalog does not add up to that number). And stupid apps (I have not asked for) generate additional traffic and waste cpu cycles.
I have already caught Windows 10 blocking legitimate programs for 'my protection'. I downloaded a driver from HP's website and Win10 would not let me run it. There was no clear instructions on how to run it either.
This is the second step into blocking users from installing software any way they want. Microsoft will tell us that they want us to use the Windows store to download our "apps" because it is safer, the apps can be vetted. What they really want is to get a cut of every software purchase. Look at how much money Apple and Google make from their app stores.
The first step was, of course, to have an app store and to rename programs "apps".
Windows 10 blocks unsigned drivers because that is the primary method for rootkits and all sorts of other malware to infect the system. By their very nature, Drivers run with the same permissions of the kernel, giving them access to everything on the system, do you really want code to run with those permissions without being checked?
The solution would be for HP to get their heads out of their asses and sign their damn drivers.
And if the Windows user trusts the driver vendor (HP) and wishes to go ahead with the install, he should still be prevented from doing so, because Microsoft's installer can't tell the difference between a HP-sourced driver and one from the dark web?
Sometimes unsigned drivers are all we have, and simply stating that HP should sign the driver doesn't make it happen. What if they don't? Should the poster have to buy a new peripheral or computer (since we don't know what it is the driver in question is for) if HP decides against "getting their heads out of their asses?" Ideally, they would sign it, but we don't live in an ideal world, and an OS that is inflexible and unwilling to trust the administrator enough to let them decide if a driver is trusted is not going to work for many of us. Having to buy new hardware when the existing hardware (1) works and (2) has a working driver would be wasteful and unnecessary.
For another example, I have a video card in my laptop that has a device ID string that doesn't exist in any driver's .INF file (specifically, the subsystem ID does not match any known combinations of DEV and VEN IDs). If I didn't edit the .INF, I would not be able to install a driver other than the generic VGA driver in Windows. Linux drivers work fine, as they only parse the VEN and DEV fields, but Windows requires a direct match if all four fields are specified in the .INF file, and they are in all of the Nvidia drivers.
The driver is a signed Nvidia WHQL driver that is correct for my card, but as soon as I edit the .INF file, it no longer matches the hash, making the signature invalid (as it should). The driver installs and works perfectly well after I dismiss the "unable to verify origin" message, which is to be expected, given that it is in fact the correct driver for the card.
Now I know that the edit I made in the .INF file (changed all of 8 characters, if I recall) didn't create a rootkit. The MS installer may not know that, but I do. I know where I got the driver (Nvidia site), and I know what all of the modifications were (since I made them). I know it's not malware. I know a good deal more about the situation regarding this driver than Windows does!
In this case, we can't say Nvidia should sign the driver, as they already have. I can't wait for them to release a driver that will install unmodified on my laptop. That will never happen, as my full device ID is not one that ever existed in "nature," not to mention that the card went into legacy status a few months ago.
Once again, it looks like the only solution would be to go buy more hardware, even though what I have works perfectly well once the unsigned driver is accepted.
At some point, the OS has to trust that the administrator is not an idiot. Issue the warning, then ask what to do (as Windows 7 did in my case). If the administrator is truly incompetent, Windows signature verification is not going to be enough to protect the system anyway. If the admin knows what he's doing, a hard and fast rule like this just gets in the way of making things work.
You can disable the driver signing requirement in WIn 8 / 10 (Same procedure as Server 2012 / 2012 R2)
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/emberger/2014/04/21/windows-server-2012-r2-install-unsigned-drivers/
The steps are convoluted, but its a procedure that only needs to happen in 1 in a million systems.
Not really much pooint to this anyway, as with recent action Microsoft have just taken a huge shit on all Windoes Mobile 8/10 users by effectivaly abandonibg the platform.
Even motre ironic, as they flushed about $8bn down the drian on this, when just spending $1bn of it writing the missing apps would have been enough to give to some momentum.
BTW Everytime they release a fix for Windows Mobile 10, if fucks something else up on my Nokia 735. Seriously thinking about downgrading it back to Windows Mobile 8.1
Microshaft changing the rules for developers (again, and again, and again) is just SHOOTING THEMSELVES IN THEIR OWN FOOT. Again. And again.
Back in the 90's it was "Developers, developers, developers, developers!". Micro-shaft NEEDED developers to write "the killer 'app'" (they called it an 'app' way back then) for Windows in order to get people to buy computers with Windows on them.
THEN, in the early 21st century, when Ballmer took the helm, he steered towards the rocks with ".Not" (aka '.Net') in the ".Net Initiative" which was SUPPOSED to leverage all of the ".bomb" stuff in Micro-shaft's favor, with a ONE LOGON FOR ALL SERVICES (aka 'Microsoft Logon'), so that Amazon and K-mart and Target and Frys and everybody ELSE would _ALL_ use THEIR login for the online stores and services.
Well we know what happened with THAT.
The fallout: That _HIDEOUS_ ".Not" library, Micro-shaft's STUPID invention of "C-pound" to try and replace Java, and the ATTEMPT to CHANGE THINGS so that SENIOR DEVELOPERS were _NOW_ *JUNIOR* developers! Because, Micro-shaft. Because, it's THEIR way under THEIR control!
Well, when you look at the TIOBE index, you don't see a LOT of ".Not" demand, but you DO see a lot of C, C++, Java, web, even Python (which exceeded C-pound for a short time, as I recall).
So THEN Micro-shaft tried other things, like Silverlight. FAIL. Then they went with Windows 8, to change the back-end to a form that was COMPLETELY different, trying to leverage the desktop into THEIR image so that EVERYONE would be forever LOCKED IN to doing it THEIR WAY.
That failed, TOO. And Win-10-nic *FAILS* to recover that.
So, NOW Micro-shaft wants to "allow" the *LEGACY* Win32 API appLICATIONS in their "the Store"?
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
But I know what's coming next: Win-10-nic BLOCKING ANYTHING FROM INSTALLING OR RUNNING THAT WAS NOT OBTAINED VIA "THE STORE". You watch, it's coming.
Because Micro-Shaft is in full-blown "SUICIDE MODE", starting with the shotgun pointed at their feet, and then working their way up.
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