Windows 10: Only UWP apps are displayed in the start menu, and there is no desktop apps I downloaded

Zimeng Lv · Jan 8, 2021

Desktop applications are not be displayed in the start menu, but they are displayed normally in the folder of the start menu, and the shortcuts can also be opened normally.

At the same time, right-click "Start" icon does not respond, and Windows+X does not respond, too.

I've ever asked this question in Chinese community, but they didn't solve my question.

:)

Brink · Jan 8, 2021

Bringing your existing desktop apps to UWP

At Build 2016, we showed you how to use the Desktop App Converter to bring your existing desktop applications to the universal .appx packaging format as a first step to bringing your application to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). Once on UWP, your apps are easier for users to manage and install, and you can integrate engaging UWP functionality and reach customers across the Windows 10 platform, including on IoT devices, Xbox One and HoloLens. We’d like to take this opportunity to further provide some context about the converter and other tooling involved (previously part of Project “Centennial”), and help you get started with the Desktop Bridge.

Since the release of the initial preview in early April, we’ve already seen hundreds of apps being converted and deployed for early testing. With the latest Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14342, you can now run the Desktop App Converter on the Professional version of Windows, alongside the Enterprise edition that was previously enabled. Now is a great time to get started with converting your existing desktop applications to bring them to UWP!

What is the Desktop Bridge?

The Desktop Bridge brings a number of important improvements to the Windows platform for all developers. First, you can convert existing Windows desktop apps or games to .appx packages, so your users will be able to install them easily and experience seamless updates, be it through the Windows Store or any distribution channel of your choice.

Once converted to the UWP application model, the desktop app has access to new UWP APIs, including Live Tiles, push notifications and local/roaming app data, which previously were inaccessible to desktop apps. With this conversion process, your existing code continues to run with minimal changes and UWP deployment ensures that whatever state the app writes to the PC is isolated and easily cleaned up on uninstall – addressing a major pain point users have had with desktop apps in the past. Additionally, the app can now expose App Services, run Background Tasks, and have a XAML UI by adding a UWP app container process to the same app package.

With your existing code now running in the UWP application model, it’s straightforward to add additional functionality over time, gradually migrating existing Win32/.NET code to move functionality into the app container. Running your code in the app container benefits the security of your user’s machine, and at the end of the migration results in a UWP app that can run on PCs, Phones, IoT devices, Xbox One and HoloLens.

Convert – Create an .appx deployment package for your desktop application

Enhance – Call new UWP APIs from your desktop application

Extend – Add new functionality, such as UWP App Services and Background Tasks

Migrate – Move more code into the app container part of your package, such as a XAML UI frontend

Expand – Finish the migration of all code to the app container and expand your reach to all Windows devices

Getting Started

To get started, you need the current Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14342 (or higher), and the Windows 10 Anniversary SDK Preview Build 14332 (or higher). Please keep this installation separate from your production environment, as this build does not output valid app package for Store deployment. Next you’ll need the latest Desktop App Converter to complete your development environment. This tool converts your desktop app installer (such as MSI) to an .appx package that can be deployed to a Windows 10 Anniversary Edition desktop. If you’re trialing Visual Studio “15” Preview 2, you can also take a look at the packaging and debug support for projects that are using the Desktop Bridge. For more information, please read the Visual Studio blog post on Visual Studio “15” support with the Desktop Bridge.

If your desktop application does not have an installer (e.g. deployment just consists of file copy operations), or you want to explore the Desktop Bridge with a simple example first, you can check out our sample repo on GitHub. Using the Basic Desktop Bridge App sample as a template, you can replace the sample .exe with your binaries, adjust the respective entries in the manifest according to the documentation and you are done with the conversion. You don’t even need to install and run the Desktop App Converter for this type of project!

Test, Update, Enhance and Extend your converted app

Once you have successfully converted your desktop app (either with the Desktop App Converter or manually), you are ready to deploy, test and enhance your app. Now that your app is in the UWP app model and has an .appx package, the methods for doing this are the same as for any UWP app. Check out our Deploy and Debug documentation for detailed steps on side-loading and debugging. Note that your converted app may need some code changes in some cases. Be sure to read the Preparing Your Desktop App for Conversion to UWP topic on the Windows Dev Center.

You can now iterate on your code and start enhancing your app with exciting new UWP features that were previously not available to desktop apps. Add background tasks and app services. Add a UWP process to your package to host a UWP XAML UI frontend, and so much more. We will continue to update the Desktop Bridge sample repo on GitHub to demonstrate many of these great UWP features consumed by converted desktop applications, as we are getting closer to the final release of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update.

Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing more in-depth information about these approaches, what the end-to-end developer process looks like and how to add new functionality to your existing app.

Help us improve the bridge

The Desktop Bridge offers an exciting path to migrate your existing desktop apps to UWP. It enables you to gradually move across the bridge at your own pace while keeping your existing code investments running at all times along the way.

As you explore the tools on current preview builds, we’re very keen on hearing about your experiences and receiving your feedback. The best place to make feature suggestions is on the Windows Developer UserVoice site. For questions and bug reports, please head over to the Developing Universal Windows apps forums.

Additional resources

Desktop conversion for UWP apps on Dev Center

Build 2016 breakout session – Bringing Existing Desktop Applications to the Universal Windows Platform by John Sheehan, Peyman Zanjani

Build 2016 pre-record session – Bringing Desktop Apps to the UWP Using Desktop App Converter by David Tepper, Avneet Singh

Channel 9 Live interview – John Sheehan, David Tepper, Stefan Wick

Written by Stefan Wick, Principal Program Manager Lead for the Desktop Bridge
Click to expand...

Source: Bringing your existing desktop apps to UWP | Building Apps for Windows

Brink · Jan 8, 2021

The path from a desktop app to a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app

Last month, we provided an overview of the Desktop Bridge in this blog post. We are excited to announce that since then we’ve released a new version of the desktop app converter, adding support for great new features and fixing several issues to provide a more stable environment. To learn more about the improvements in the Desktop App Converter, please visit http://aka.ms/converter.

Today, we will follow up with a walkthrough of a concrete coding example that takes an existing desktop app and gradually migrates and enhances it with the Desktop Bridge into a full Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app that can run on all Windows 10 devices—such as Xbox One, HoloLens, phones, et cetera—and take full advantage of the platform.
Our starting point is a simple Windows Forms app that keeps track of the user’s status by storing it in the registry. Essentially, we start with this:

[table][tr][td]1 2 3 4[/td] [td]private void cmbBox_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { MyRegKey.SetValue("Status", cmbBox.SelectedItem); }[/td] [/tr] [/table]

The code for this sample app, as well as the code for each of the steps along the journey across the bridge, can be found in our sample repo on GitHub. As we gradually migrate our app, it remains fully functional every step of the way and picks up additional features that will help keep users engaged.

Step 1: Convert

As a first step to get our app on the bridge, we take it through the conversion process. There are a couple of options to do this initial step. For a simple app like this, which gets installed just by copying binaries, we can quickly perform a manual conversion as explained in this article on Dev Center and demonstrated in this sample on GitHub. Apps that are using a .MSI (or similar) installer should use the Desktop App Converter for the conversion process. Finally, there are several third party install tool providers who are in the process of adding support for the Desktop Bridge to UWP in their products, as well, such as Advanced Installer, FireGiant and InstallShield.

Once the conversion is complete, we want to test, adjust, and enhance our application in Visual Studio. For that, we can take advantage of the project type for UWP packaging, which the Visual Studio team recently introduced for Visual Studio 15 Preview 2 (see this post for details and instructions).

Now we can hit F5 and debug our application running within the UWP app model. With the conversion, a number of immediate platform benefits become available automatically, such as Start menu integration, clean install/update/uninstall, and distribution of the .appx package via your choice of distribution.

Step 2: Enhance

Now that we have brought our app into the UWP app model, an app identity (as specified in the appxmanifest.xml file) is added, which enables our app to call UWP APIs that were not available to our desktop application before. Let’s look at an example of how to add a Live Tile to our app. The goal is to update the tile on the Start menu whenever the user’s status changes:

[table][tr][td]1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17[/td] [td]private void comboBox1_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { MyRegKey.SetValue("Status", comboBox1.SelectedItem); // Update the apps live tile XmlDocument tileXml = TileUpdateManager.GetTemplateContent(TileTemplateType.TileSquare150x150Text03); XmlNodeList textNodes = tileXml.GetElementsByTagName("text"); textNodes[0].InnerText = "MyDesktopApp"; textNodes[1].InnerText = "Status: "; textNodes[2].InnerText = comboBox1.SelectedItem.ToString(); textNodes[3].InnerText = DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss"); TileNotification tileNotification = new TileNotification(tileXml); TileUpdateManager.CreateTileUpdaterForApplication().Update(tileNotification); }[/td] [/tr] [/table]

Step 3: Extend

In addition to calling more UWP APIs, we can now also add UWP components to our app package to take advantage of other exciting UWP features. Examples of this include adding App Services, becoming a sharing target or a file picker, or adding background tasks.

With background tasks, an app can respond to triggers to execute code even when the app is not running—even if the device is in connected stand-by mode. This way, you can always keep your app up to date and create an experience of an app that is always alive. To illustrate this in our example, we want to use the TimeTrigger to periodically check the status and notify the user via a toast notification:

Now that your Winforms app has identity and runs in the UWP app model. You can declare background tasks in your manifest and register them from your code the same way a UWP can do today:
[table][tr][td]1[/td] [td]RegisterBackgroundTask("Timer", new TimeTrigger(15, false));[/td] [/tr] [/table]

When the TimeTrigger fires, the system will invoke your registered background task in a UWP app container process and you can run code even if your app is not currently running:
[table][tr][td]1 2 3 4 5 6 7[/td] [td]public sealed class BgTask : IBackgroundTask { public void Run(IBackgroundTaskInstance taskInstance) { ShowToast("Status: " + currentStatus); } }[/td] [/tr] [/table]

Step 4: Migrate

To take advantage of UWP UI features such as a touch-friendly UI and smooth animations, let’s migrate the user experience of our project to a XAML front-end. In practice, the details of the UI migration depend on the Win32 UI framework your app has been using and the complexity of your UI. In this simple example, the changes are straightforward. In most real apps, however, this step will require more developer resources.

At this time, we can delete our now obsolete Windows Forms related UI code. However, we still want to keep around our desktop app process for our existing business logic (i.e. managing the app’s state via registry). To communicate between the two processes, we are using an App Service as communication pipeline.

[table][tr][td]1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10[/td] [td]private async void cmbBox_SelectionChanged(object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e) { ValueSet valueSet = new ValueSet(); valueSet.Add("StatusUpdate", cmbBox.SelectedItem.ToString()); if (App.Connection != null) { AppServiceResponse response = await App.Connection.SendMessageAsync(valueSet); }[/td] [/tr] [/table]

Step 5: Expand

In the final step, we will now expand the reach of our application to all Windows 10 devices that run UWP apps by moving the last remaining pieces of code into the UWP app container process. To do so, we will replace the registry-based state with the UWP-compliant ApplicationData API. Thus, we can now deploy our app to phones, Xbox One, HoloLens and other Windows devices that run UWP apps.

Conclusion

The Desktop Bridge offers an exciting path to migrate your existing desktop apps to UWP. It enables you to gradually move across the bridge at your own pace while keeping your existing code investments running at all times along the way.

As you explore the tools on current preview builds, we’re very keen to hear your experiences and feedback. The best place to make feature suggestions is on the Windows Developer UserVoice site. For questions and bug reports, please head over to the Developing Universal Windows apps forums.
Click to expand...

Source: The path from a desktop app to a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app | Building Apps for Windows

xraiderv1 · Jan 8, 2021

start menu stuck displaying all apps

so...as the title suggests, my stepfather's start menu is stuck on all apps....how do I unfrak this?

Windows 10: Only UWP apps are displayed in the start menu, and there is no desktop apps I downloaded

Only UWP apps are displayed in the start menu, and there is no desktop apps I downloaded

Only UWP apps are displayed in the start menu, and there is no desktop apps I downloaded

Only UWP apps are displayed in the start menu, and there is no desktop apps I downloaded

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