In an app-centric world, Windows 8 will be adopting the trend full-on with a Swiss Army Knife full of new tricks. One of which is a new universal application deployment system called AppX which I’ve been recently been able to take a first look at.
Although Windows 8 will disrupt many components of applications, including how they are written (Immersive) and distributed (application store), AppX concerns only the deployment aspect of applications. More precisely, it’s a tight specification that describes how applications are packaged and installed.
Clearly inspired by XAPs for Silverlight, the critical aspect of AppX packages is an XML manifest file appropriately named the “AppXManifest.xml”. In this file, developers will have to specify many compulsory and optional attributes of their application, in fact, much more than what’s required from Windows Phone developers.
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