After you have fully developed your Windows WPF program, you may want to create an installer so that others can install your and use your Windows program.

YouTube can be very helpful for many things, including this challenge. The name of the hour-long video is MSIX Installer for Desktop Applications – Packaging WPF, WinForms, and UWP Applications. In that video, Tim uses software called Syncfusion Metro Studio to create a program icon. At time 4:00 Tim begins to create the installer for the very simple application. He adds a new project of type Windows Application Packaging Project. If you cannot find that option then perhaps you don’t have the UWP option installed on Visual Studio. You’ll need to install that. To do that in VS, click Tools, Get Tools and Features, and be sure the check box is checked for Universal Windows Platform Development. Then click the Modify button to install it if it wasn’t clicked when you opened it.

When you are adding the project you will need to provide a name. You can call it whatever you like. Time calls it “DemoInstaller” because it’s the installer for a project called “WPFDemoApp”. The next step is to choose the platform versions. You could just leave the two platforms suggested, depending on your needs. The project will be created.

Let’s look at the Applications folder under our new project. This asks which applications we need to deploy. Right-click, Add Reference, check the check box beside the name of your project, and click the Ok button.

The next step is to prepare our program icon, if you haven’t already done so. If we don’t already have one, we can use Syncfusion’s Metro Studio to create one. Tim Corey’s video on YouTube called MSIX Installer for Desktop Applications – Packaging WPF, WinForms, and UWP Applications at about time 9:00 to 11:00. If you use that, remember to make the background transparent. Make the size 1024 by 1024. Make the padding about 32 pixels. This is very large but it scales down well and it will work okay.