Noticed today that the installer for Manager Desktop comes as an MSIX installer rather than an MSI.
When installing on my machine (Win11 Pro 23H2), the result of installing the MSIX was predictable. Nothing happened to the existing installation, nor did anything change with my other shortcuts because it’s a side-by-side installation.
For less savvy users, it might be worth making them aware of the new deployment format and that they may wish to first uninstall Manager before installing the MSIX version. Maybe that can be done via the download page, or maybe there’s a way to perform that logic within Manager itself to detect a SxS installation and notify the user.
As always, thanks for making Manager Desktop gratis/free to use.
Unfortunately MSIX doesn’t support ability to uninstall previous MSI package. So the transition is quite a challenge. What I did is that it’s only when the program launches, it will look for MSI packages and uninstall them. The installation itself won’t remove previously installed MSI (it will remove previously installed MSIX though)
So yeah, there is a logic within Manager to handle this. This is how Microsoft recommends it to be done.
MSI is really old format that was originally created (if I’m not mistaken) to install MS Office back in 90s. MSIX is modern approach.
I’ll be honest, I did zero experimentation when I did this. I had Manager (from MSI) already installed when I did the MSIX installation, so the logic you refer to likely didn’t have a chance to run at all.