CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wcfdeploymentautomationstorecontinuous-deployment
Div
Div

Reputation: 23

Win8 Store App - Automating Sideloading Deployment

I am in a development team which have just about finished developing a system for a client which involves a MVC4 Web, a WCF service platform and a Windows Store App which communicates with the web that the service.

We are running Continuous Integration practices for the Web & Service solutions which include automated deployment to dev, test, acctest and production environments. Building, testing, configuring and deploying to production is one click and five minutes away.

The one huge pitfall that we've had in this project was the fact that we chose to develop the app as a Windows Store App without investigating deployment possibilities which do not involve publishing the application to Windows Store. This is a process called sideloading, and i will not go deep into the technical requirements which Microsoft impends to enable this.

Our client will be using the application on 20~ Surface Pro tablets, and we are investigating into an automated release/deploy process for the application. As of this moment, we are using OneDrive to manage build artifacts and let the customer IT admin download the artifact from there to manually install the app on all clients. In the future, however, it is very possible that the organization who ordered the system will deploy this worldwide and there will be a requirement to deploy the application to hundreds, if not thousands of clients.

We spent entire weeks investigating whether Windows Intune can be a good platform for automated deployment of the application. If an organization installs the Intune platform, it's clients get the Company Portal which is like a private Store, where we could upload the app and updates to it in the future. There was, however, one big minus with the Company Portal - it has NO update management for Store Apps. That is, releasing a new version of our application to the Company Portal does not work like releasing a patch or update of your app to the Windows Store - there's no notification that there is a new version, and the application does not update itself. It's basically a new application that needs to be downloaded and installed after the previous version has been uninstalled.

Has anyone developed Windows Store Line-Of-Business applications which you had to sideload to multiple clients, and if so - which solution did you choose for update/patch management?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 169

Answers (1)

Niels
Niels

Reputation: 1716

I am experiencing the exact same problem. Intune is indeed limited and too complex for many scenarios at the same time. Another option to "deploy" LOB Windows Store apps is described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/jj657971.aspx. This covers the well known powershell deployment which is not very practical.

However, I have found an early stage, unofficial POC project on codeplex which I am currently investigating. You might want to take look at this: https://bootybay.codeplex.com/

Upvotes: 1

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