I have a C# solution with VS 2017, containing an app project, a desktop extension project, and a packaging project. As I mentioned in the answer of this question, I finally get msbuild to create a single bundle with both x86 and x64 for me. However, after I tried to install from that bundle, I found that msbuild actually picked up the wrong package.appxmanifest because they have different version numbers.
So... I have two package.appxmanifest, one in packaging project, and one in my main app project. When I build from the wizard in VS 2017, the one in packaging project will be used, which is correct. When I use msbuild to build with just one platform, it will pick the right one as well, like this:
msbuild .\MyApp.sln /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=x86
Only when I use msbuild to build two platforms together, it will use the one in my main app project:
msbuild .\MyApp.sln /p:Configuration=Release /p:AppxBundlePlatforms="x86|x64" /p:UapAppxPackageBuildMode=StoreUpload
I also tried to build the packaging project instead of the solution, but because our desktop extension project is only x86, I will get errors about configurations when building x64.
Questions:
<AppxBundle>Always</AppxBundle> or <AppxBundle>Never</AppxBundle> to the packaging project?
- Does anyone know why this is happening?
That because you have two Package.appxmanifest files with same ID in the solution. When you create the App Bundle with .sln, MSBuild/Visual Studio could not to know clearly which Package.appxmanifest should be use.
- I am also very confused about how to build multi-platform using AppxBundlePlatforms in the command line. Since I cannot specify the platform, which platform is used to build?
Not sure the reason why you can not specify the platform. To resolve this issue, you can try yo build the project file .csproj instead of the solution file. For example, when you build the app project, you can use the command line:
msbuild .\MyApp.csproj /p:Configuration=Release /p:AppxBundlePlatforms="x86|x64"
And then build the packaging project:
msbuild .\YouPackaging.csproj /p:Configuration=Release /p:AppxBundlePlatforms="x86"
- Should I add Always or Never to the packaging project?
If you build the project, no need to add those two properties to the project file, those two properties are used to the solution level and you have a project that you do not want to add to the bundle:
because at the solution level, it’s not clear which app should appear in the bundle. To resolve this issue, open each project file and add the following properties at the end of the first element
Hope this helps.