Does a desktop-bridge app auto-update through the Microsoft store - visual-c++

I have a traditional Win32 desktop app written in C++/MFC that I have packaged as a UWP app for the Microsoft store using the desktop-bridge facility in Visual Studio 2019. It is currently published on the store, and users have been downloading it successfully.
I now need to release an update. I have incremented the Version numbers in the Packaging tab of the Package.appxmanifest and have a package just-about ready to submit to the Store. I hope (expect?) that current users will get their existing copy of the app automatically updated if they have set that choice in the Store app itself, or if they manually check the Store for updates. However, I am not sure whether that is actually true. Do I need to do anything within my program itself to make that happen?
Thanks for any help.

Yes, desktop bridge apps published in the Store update automatically.

Related

Deployment custom App in Microsoft Teams

I am developing a chatbot azure service, which I want to integrate within Microsoft Teams. So far everything is working but the "re-install" of the package in the Microsoft Teams.
I created a publish "folder-profile". Then I zip the result with the manifest.json and the icon files inside. I go to the Manage Team section and in the Apps tab I select upload a custom app. Then I choose the .zip file and the service seems to be there(Actually it is there)
It works, but when I create a new version and I repeat the described steps, it seems like Microsoft Teams is still using my old code.
I test the chatbot in the Chat by using #"APP-ID" and I see how my changes work, but installed as an App for the "Team" keeps the old version.
I tried to uninstall it, check if the bot is gone(it is gone) and then upload again, but some kind of cache is there and the bot behaves like in the previous version.
Any idea how is the correct way to deploy new versions of my app in Microsoft Teams?
I think you need to upgrade the version number in the manifest.json file (you can do it in the manifest.source.json before to generate your zip).

Package Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.Web not compatible with netcoreapp

Full problem text:
Package Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.Web 2.4.0 is not compatible with netcoreapp1.1 (.NETCoreApp,Version=v1.1)
Package Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.Web 2.4.0 supports:
- net40 (.NETFramework,Version=v4.0)
- net45 (.NETFramework,Version=v4.5)
So when I try to access Live Metrics Stream in Azure I get the message:
Not available: your app is offline or using an older SDK
and the following step-by-step guide to getting it:
Make a copy of ApplicationInsights.config if you customized ApplicationInsights.config.
In Solution Explorer, right-click your project and choose Manage NuGet packages.
Select Browse.
Search for Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.Web, select it and choose Install/Update. You need version 2.2.0 (or later).
Reinstate any customizations you made to ApplicationInsights.config. Most of the changes you'll see when you compare the files are because we removed some modules and made others parameterizable.
Rebuild your solution.
(I haven't customized no ApplicationInsights.config so started at 2, got the error after 4)
So I'm not entirely sure what the problem here is, on thing I guess from the problem text is that ApplicationInsights.Web works with .NETFramework and not with .NETCoreApp. In that case my question would be:
What's the ApplicationInsights.Web alternative for .NETCoreApp? Plus, why does Azure recommend this step-by-step guide to me? Can't they see that I'm running a .NETCoreApp?
In case it's relevant:
I have student access to Visual Studio and Azure through something called Microsoft Imagine.
The guide is for classic MVC, not MVC Core.
For ASP.NET Core, you should be able to add App Insights with the connected service in Visual Studio: https://ppolyzos.com/2017/03/07/add-application-insights-in-a-net-core-app-using-vs-2017-and-connected-services/
To add one of the supported connected services you can right-click on
your Project and select Add Connected Service. Select Application
Insights and, from the next dialog, click on the Start Free button to
start the registration of Application Insights in your app.
Then, connect your Microsoft Azure account, choose your subscription
and resource group and, at the bottom, select whether you want app
insights to continue collecting data beyond 1 GB/month or not, and
click on Register. A popup will appear displaying the progress of App
Insights registration process.
Also, the package that the connected service installs is: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.AspNetCore/

Access 2013 web app - restoring previous app snapshot package without reverting data (structured staging environment)

I have a reasonably complex Access 2013 web app which is now in production on hosted O365 Sharepoint. I would like to take a backup (package snapshot) into a test environment, and then migrate this to production once development is complete (I certainly don't want to do development on the production system!). The problem is that the snapshot also backs up all data so uploading the new package over the top of the existing package in the sharepoint app repository reverts the data to the time of snapshot as well. Alternatively, rolling back to the original snapshot if there are issues would lose all data after the new package was applied.
I can easily get a second version of the app going by saving as a new application etc but this creates a new product ID etc in the app store. We also use a Access 2013 desktop accdb frontend to hook directly into the Azure SQL database to do all the stuff that the web app can't provide (formatted reports etc) so I cant just create a new app every time without dealing with all of the credential and database renaming issues.
So my question is, does anybody know how to safely operate a test environment for Access 2013 web app development? One needs to be able to apply an updated version, or rollback to the old one if there are problems without rolling back the data. With the desktop client I can just save a new copy of the accdb file every time obviously. I dont mind creating a new instance or link to the app on sharepoint each time, however this obviously generates a totally new database (server name, db location, login id's etc) as well. You would hope there is a way to upload and replace your app without touching the data, else how else can you develop without working directly in production?
Any answers would be really appreciated.
Thanks.

Windows Azure deployment keeps a old version of the Silverlight application

I have a small solution that is composed out of 2 main projects a Mvc4 Web Api and a silverlight 5 Application. I've configured and deploy the application initially on the Azure platform and it all went great, but ever since when I deploy again the silverlight project does not get pushed and the online site has the old version.
I should mention all works great with the azure simulator on my local dev machine.
Anybody had a similar issue?
Regards,
I would suspect first (as Simon suggests) that the browser likely still has the previous client cached and loads that instead of downloading your new client.
You can use the version number in the code on your page that hosts the silverlight app to help. While it's easy for you to clear the cache - you don't really want to have to tell users to do that whenever you update.
Set the version to whatever your latest assembly version is (silverlight client project assembly), this will force the browser to download the client if the cached version is a lower number.
<param name="source" value="AppPath/App.xap?version=2.0.0.6"/>
Ok,
So after pulling my hair out, I finally figured out.
I have to change the build configuration to release in VS do a rebuild and then do publish because apparently the azure project does not do rebuild on the project when you publish it.
To solve this issue you'll need to identify the source of the problem (is it a client side problem where you have a caching issue or not). Even though you say caching isn't the problem we'll need to be sure about this first.
What I suggest is that you do the following first:
Activate Remote Desktop on your role
Connect through RDP and save this file to the role: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841290 (fciv.exe)
Find the *.xap file (usually in E:\sitesroot) and get its checksum (using fciv.exe)
Modify the Silverlight project locally (maybe change a label or move around an element) to make sure its hash has changed.
Redeploy the application
Connect through RDP and use fciv.exe to get the checksum of the *.xap file once again
Compare both checksums
If the checksums are different, then it means that the deployment worked correctly and the Silverlight xap has been updated. If the checksum is the same, the problem lies with the deployment.
Please let us know the result so we can help you find the solution.

How to publish MSHTHML.dll and SHDOCVW.dll to Azure

I have a 3rd party web page screen capture DLL from http://websitesscreenshot.com/ that lets me target a URL and save the page to a image file. I've moved this code into my Azure-based project and when I run it on my local sandboxed dev box and save to the Azure blob, everything is fine. But when I push the bits to my live server on Azure, it's failing.
I think this is because either MSHTML.dll and/or SHDOCVW.dll are missing from my Azure configuration.
How can I get these libraries (plus any dependent binaries) up to Azure?
I found the following advice on an MSFT forum but haven't tried it yet. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazuredevelopment/thread/0344dcff-6fdd-4479-a3b4-3e89750a92f4/
Hello, I haven't tried mshtml in the cloud. But generally speaking, to
use a native dll in a Web Role, you add the dll to the Web Role
project just like adding a picture (choose add existing items). Then
make sure the Build Action is set to Content. This tells Visual Studio
to copy the dll file to the output package.
Also check dependencies carefully. A lot of problems related to native
code are caused by missing dependencies, such as a particular VC++
runtime dll.
Thought I'd ask here first before I burn a day or two on an unproven solution.
EDIT #1:
it turns out that our problem was not related to MSHTML.dll or SHDOCVW.dll missing from the Azure server. They're there.
The issue is that by default new server instance have the IE security hardening feature enabled, and this was preventing our 3rd party dll from executing script. So we needed to turn off the enhanced IE security configuration settings. This is also a non-trivial exercise.
In the meantime, we just created a server-side version of the feature on our site we need to make screen captures from (e.g. we eliminated JSON-based rendering of UI on the client), and we were able to proceed.
I think the solution mentioned in the MSDN forum thread is correct. You should put them as part of your project files, so that the SDK will package and deploy them to the VM on the cloud.
But if they are COM and need to be registed you'd better call the register command via the Startup feature. Please check http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/hh351539
HTH

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