MSIX Hero 0.9 – Understand update impacts and more

A new version of MSIX Hero (0.9) has been released. This build contains new functions and several improvements and fixes to reported issues.

Analyzing update impacts

This new feature lets you compare two packages from the same family (but with different version) and estimate the update impacts. MSIX has an out-of-the-box support for byte-level differencing, which is super handy during updates, where the MSIX source is on a remote location. The MSIX framework is intelligent enough to understand what has actually changed between two versions, and only download the chunks, containing the changed or added content.

With MSIX Hero, you can do a dry-run, and see how much really needs to be re-downloaded. For example, the following picture shows the update impact when updating MSIX Hero from version 0.6 to 0.9:

This means that although the new package contains as much as 67 MB files (25 MB after compression), only 1.9 MB will be downloaded on your computer when executing this particular update path. This is is just around 7.7% of the total package size, a true relief for the msixhero.net server 🙂

You can also use the other tabs to find out about the exact size of added, changed, deleted or unchanged resources, plus an exact list of changed files with their impact on the overall update.

In order to start playing around, press Update impact analyzer in the Tools ribbon and follow the on-screen instructions.

Version 0.9 has a limitation – it can only compare MSIX/APPX packages. Support for bundles will be added later.

Event viewer has been promoted to the main screen

Prior to MSIX Hero 0.9, in order to view MSIX/APPX logs, it was necessary to open a dialog by going to HOME > MSIX event logs.

In this new version, the viewer for logs is available directly from the left panel:

A few visual changes have been applied:

• More logs are read at once
• It is possible to filter the list by using the search box
• The type of the log is now an icon instead of text
• Three buttons are displayed in the ribbon to open the system Event viewer with the requested data loaded.

Compact package list now shows architecture instead of the package type

In the compact view, the place of the package type (UWP, Win32 etc.) has been now taken by the architecture (x86, x64 etc). You can still see the old value in the full list view (by dragging the splitter between the list and the sidebar) or in the sidebar.

By the way, it is now possible to sort and group the list by the value of the Architecture column.

Small visual adjustments

There are small visual adjustments in this builds. Most of them are visible in the package list and the ribbon:

• The background color for contextual tabs changed from green to dark blue:

• Several lines and borders have been removed for some cleaner look and feel:

• A button to open Settings has been added at the bottom of the left sidebar.
• The top bar in the Package Expert window and in the package sidebar is now a bit smaller to allow for more content.

Other changes

• Some packages with custom namespace prefixes (other than ns or uap) could be read improperly in versions prior to 0.9. This has been fixed in this build.
• Several operations are now cancellable.
• A problem with inconsistent tile color in the package list and in the sidebar has been fixed in this build.

Download

The app will be updated automatically in a few hours if you installed it from app installer file. New users can download MSIX Hero from the Download page.