Migrating to the new Windows Store experience

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 18:56:24 +0000

The Microsoft Store for Business will be discontinued mid 2023 and Intune recently introduced the new Windows Store experience backed by winget to distribute apps to your Intune managed endpoints.

To simplify the migration to the new Windows Store experience I created a PowerShell Script that migrates all currently assigned Windows Store for Business apps to the new Windows Store experience.

Kudos to Sander Rozemuller for providing detailed instructions about creating winget apps as PowerShell code samples.

Challenges
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While scripting and extracting the existing Windows Store for Business (WSfB) apps I encountered the following issues:

Not all apps in WSfB have valid privacy and information URLs, therefore I added a check whether the URL starts with http(s).
Some apps have characters present (äöüë….) that require UTF-8 encoding. So I explicitly set the HTTP content-type header to UTF8.

Script prerequisites
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To run the script you need to have the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK modules installed on your machine. You can install them with the following command:

Install-Module Microsoft.Graph.Authentication, Microsoft.Graph.Devices.CorporateManagement -Scope CurrentUser

From a permissions perspective you need an Azure AD Application Administrator for the initial OAuth permission consent and for regular execution the Intune Administrator role.

Inside Windows package manager (winget)

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 23:11:03 +0000

Windows Package Manager (winget) provides exciting features to install and upgrade apps on Windows devices. But how does winget actually work and how are new packages integrated? Within this post I want to elaborate on some questions I had when having a closer look into winget.

How does winget find sources?
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By default, winget has the following sources configured:

msstore: Microsoft Store (public)
winget: Winget Content Delivery Network (CDN)

When searching for a particular package, e.g: winget search wireshark all configured sources are searched for a match.

lesson learned: winget can install packages from the public Microsoft store and the winget CDN.

How are winget CDN packages provided?
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Winget CDN packages reside within a public git repository hosted on GitHub. The repository contains an alphabetic folder structure by vendor and product name holding manifests in YAML format that describe the app details.

The manifests folder within the repo is grouped by the app vendor and app name and YAML contents of a manifest look like this:

Winget on Nicola Suter

Migrating to the new Windows Store experience

Challenges #

Script prerequisites #

Inside Windows package manager (winget)

How does winget find sources? #

How are winget CDN packages provided? #

Challenges
#

Script prerequisites
#

How does winget find sources?
#

How are winget CDN packages provided?
#