advanced installer for visual studio 2017

Save off and protect this code signing cert. Go through the wizard and obtain the code signing certificate associated with your MSA account. The name of the project doesn’t matter, but you will right click on the project, and under store click “Associate with the Windows Store”. You will need to create a (throwaway) Windows Universal App “Stub Project”. To get one, you will need to use Visual Studio. This code signing certificate will be associated with your MSA account for all packages you publish so appropriately store and secure the certificate file. If you are going to submit to the Microsoft Store, you’ll need to get this certificate from them. I wanted to have a simple example of how a developer might create a MSIX version of an old package for the Store, and TMNetSim seemed ideal. This made TMNetSim a great candidate to re-release as my first MSIX package as there would be little risk of needing code changes or shims.

Furthermore, the app is the kind of tool such that it really didn’t make sense to try to take advantage of cool new modern features, like Live Tiles and Notifications.

The deployment of the traditional MSI based installer for this app is very simple as is uses a very small subset of the Windows API and doesn’t have any dependencies. While the tool lacks features of expensive WAN emulators, it actually does a better job of simulating real-world internet connections without needing additional external load generators thanks to a Markov Chain implementation. The tool, TMNETSIM ( ) , is a software WAN emulator that you can control to set parameters like delay, jitter, and loss.

The all-time most popular download from the site is a C++ app originally written in 2003 and hasn’t been updated in over 10 years, and yet is still the most popular download almost every month. There is a variety of C and C++ Win32 applications, as well as C#.

Some are standalone exes, some have exe or msi based installers. On my website at, I have a large number of free community tools that I have created over the years. As a result, I ended up with the first MSIX package released in the Windows Store! Last Summer, I had an opportunity to work with Microsoft on the process of getting MSIX Applications created and released through the Microsoft Store.

Advanced installer for visual studio 2017