How Do I Deploy a Windows 8 App to Another Device for Testing?
If your developing a new Windows 8 app and you want to test it on another device (e.g. Surface), you’ll need to use a technique called sideloading. This can easily be done through a few steps that I’ll describe in this post.
What is Sideloading?
Windows 8 Store Apps are deployed through the Windows Store. This may seem like an obvious statement. However, by default, only Windows Store apps are permitted to install and run on Windows 8. When you install an app from the Windows Store, a Windows Store signed app package is downloaded and installed on your machine. Since only Windows Store signed apps are permitted to be executed on Windows 8, it greatly reduces the introduction of malware. For development and enterprise scenarios, you can use a technique called sideloading to install and run apps that are not Windows Store signed. I’ll cover development sideloading in this post. If you are interested in how to use sideloading for line of business apps in an enterprise, please see this post.
Development Sideloading
Development sideloading is used by Visual Studio to deploy, debug and test your app.
The general requirements for sideloading are:
- Your appx package needs to be signed.
- The certificate used for signing needs to be trusted.
- A policy (or registry key) needs to be set to allow trusted apps to run.
On a development machine, these requirements are automatically met for you by Visual Studio. Visual Studio provides a self-signing test certificate that is used to sign the package. Also, when Visual Studio is installed, a registry key is set to allow trusted apps to run. Therefore, when you debug a Windows 8 Store app using Visual Studio, the app is test certificate signed, deployed, and allowed to run.
How do I Sideload My App on Another PC or ARM Device?
In order to deploy an app, you need an App Package. Visual Studio has functionality to create an App Package you can use to deploy your app to another machine. The following steps are how to create a local App Package.
- In Visual Studio Express 2012, choose “Create App Package” in the Store menu.
Note: In Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate, the Store menu is in a different location. In the “Project” menu, use the “Store” option .
- In the Create App Package wizard, you will want to create a local package. Therefore, answer “No” to the “Do you want to build a package to upload to the Windows Store”. Notice the information text indicates this is the option for sideloading.
- The next dialog provides a choice of processor platforms to target. In most cases, you would want to choose “Any CPU”. This will allow you to target all of the processor platforms and architectures. However, if you are using platform specific binaries in your app, you’ll need to build separate packages for each platform.
- In my example, I’ll just leave the default “Any CPU” and click “Create”
Note the wizard gives us a link to where the package was created.
If we click the link, here is an example of what was created:
Here is a quick summary of the relevant files in the package directory:
Appx package (MyApp_1.0.0.0_AnyCPU_Debug.appx)
The appx package is a zip file of all of the program files for your app. This file gets deployed and installed into Windows. Try renaming the extension to “.zip” and open the zip file to see what is inside. Don’t forget to change it back before you try and deploy it.
Developer test certificate (MyApp_1.0.0.0_AnyCPU_Debug.cer)
This is your development certificate. This is the certificate that was used to sign the appx package.
PowerShell script (Add-AppDevPackage.ps1)
This PowerShell script can be used to install the development certificate and install the App.
Installing the App on the Target Machine
Everything you need to deploy the app is included in the package directory created by Visual Studio. I usually copy the directory to a USB memory stick to transfer the app to the target machine. On the target machine, you just need to run the PowerShell script (Add-AppDevPackage.ps1) to deploy the app. You can do this easily by right clicking on the script and selecting “Run with PowerShell”.
The first action performed by the script is to install the certificate. It needs to run elevated in order to perform this step. If PowerShell isn’t running elevated, the script will prompt to start an elevated process to install the certificate.
You will be warned and prompted to allow the certificate to be installed.
Once the certificate is installed, the app package is installed.
Your app should now be installed on the target machine. You should be able to find the tile on the Start screen (usually at the end of the list):
The final requirement is to allow trusted apps to run. If your target machine has Visual Studio installed, this requirement will already be met. However, if you don’t have Visual Studio installed, you can meet the requirement through group policy or setting a registry key. For development purposes, it’s usually easiest to set the registry key.
- Use RegEdit to navigate to the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Appx
- Set AllowAllTrustedApps (REG_DWORD) to the value of 1
Your app should now run on the target machine.
One final note… This is the process for development sideloading. There is a more formal process for enterprise sideloading. If you are interested in enterprise sideloading, please start with this post.
How Do I Deploy a Windows 8 App to Another Device for Testing?的更多相关文章
- 在桌面程序上和Metro/Modern/Windows store app的交互(相互打开,配置读取)
这个标题真是取得我都觉得蛋疼..微软改名狂魔搞得我都不知道要叫哪个好.. 这边记录一下自己的桌面程序跟windows store app交互的过程. 由于某些原因,微软的商店应用的安全沙箱导致很多事情 ...
- Windows Phone App Studio发布重要更新-支持Windows 8.1 源代码生成
自2013年8月Apps Team发布Windows Phone App Studio以来,由于其低入门门槛和较好的易用性,用户和项目数量增长迅速,从Windows Phone Developer B ...
- Windows Phone App的dump 文件分析
前言 我们在发布了自己的App以后,Windows Phone的Error Report机制会帮助我们收集程序的崩溃信息并发送到微软的服务器上,这可以辅助开发者提高App的稳定性. 那么如何利用这些d ...
- Windows Phone Studio-任何人都能开发Windows Phone App的在线工具
在一段时间的内测以后,微软于今天早些时候发布了其Windows Phone应用开发的在线工具,名字叫做Windows Phone Studio.其意义在于,通过简单的内容添加和样式选择,实现Windo ...
- Windows Phone App Studio 无码开发手机应用
上周微软发布了一款基于Web的Windows Phone应用开发工具 "Windows Phone App Studio".它与大家熟知Visual Studio的最大不同之处是W ...
- 打造理想的Windows 10 APP开发环境的5个步骤
(此文章同时发表在本人微信公众号"dotNET每日精华文章",欢迎右边二维码来关注.) 题记:微软即将发布Windows 10手机版,实际上很多人现在已经开始在开发Windows ...
- Windows Store App 过渡动画
Windows Store App 过渡动画 在开发Windows应用商店应用程序时,如果希望界面元素进入或者离开屏幕时显得自然和流畅,可以为其添加过渡动画.过渡动画能够及时地提示用户屏幕所发 ...
- [Windows Phone] APP上架,遇到错误2001的解决方案。(Error:2001)
[Windows Phone] APP上架,遇到错误2001的解决方案.(Error:2001) 问题情景 最近在开始玩Windows Phone的开发,开发的过程中虽然有点小挫折,但是参考网络许多前 ...
- Windows metro app wcf 地址可配置
在Windows metro app中调用wcf服务可以通过添加 “服务引用”来实现.一旦项目发布则不可修改.这个和桌面开发不一样. 现在我们通过读取文本的方式来读取wcf地址. 1.添加所需引用的w ...
随机推荐
- mysql 5.7安装脚本
[root@HE2 ~]# cat mysql_auto_install.sh ###### 二进制自动安装数据库脚本root密码MANAGER将脚本和安装包放在/root目录即可########## ...
- MongoDB笔记(四)基本管理命令
MongoDB命令帮助系统 基本命令及实例 一基本命令 二基本DDL和DML 三启动与终止 四安全管理 五数据备份恢复与迁移管理 六远程连接管理 MongoDB是一个NoSQL数据库系统:一个数据 ...
- PAT 1065 A+B and C (64bit) (20)
1065. A+B and C (64bit) (20) 时间限制 100 ms 内存限制 65536 kB 代码长度限制 16000 B 判题程序 Standard 作者 HOU, Qiming G ...
- linux下多线程踩过的坑(不定更新)
1,多线程下整个进程的退出 <<APUE>>关于进程环境一章中指出了进程退出的8个条件: ... (4)最后一个线程从启动例程中返回 (5)最后一个线程调用pthread_ex ...
- [转]Android应用的自动更新
软件的自动更新一般都与Splash界面绑定在一起, 由于需要维护的软件界面很复杂, 一个Activity中嵌入ViewPager, 并且逻辑比较复杂, 索性重新写一个Activity, 现在的软件都很 ...
- nslookup命令详解
Nslookup 是一个监测网络中DNS服务器是否能正确实现域名解析的命令行工具.它在 Windows NT/2000/XP(在之后的windows系统也都可以用的,比如win7,win8等) 中均可 ...
- 无法修改系统Host的解决办法
有些时候可能因为杀毒软件的问题,即使打开隐藏文件也是无法正常看到hosts的. 此时可以新建一个hosts文件去覆盖目录下的文件即可见 路径:C:\Windows\System32\drivers\e ...
- C#方法定义和调用-2
using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; namespace Cons ...
- Android使用Dom解析xml
一.理论准备 二.上代码 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> < ...
- MAC安装XAMPP的出现无法打开Apache server
安装MAMP后,启动服务时提示Apache启动失败,80端口被占用.查看进程发现存在几个httpd. OS X自带Apache,可是默认是没有启动的.我也没有开启Web共享,怎么就开机启动了呢? 不知 ...