[Windows RT Development and Hacking] Fasin:
Hi Blade! (Cheers from Cologne)

If I understand you correctly, you use some kind of launcher for some of your programs, which in turn starts your program (i guess you mean something like ClassicStartMenu, where you need to restart the explorer after launching the start menu, because otherwise it won't show up in the taskbar). And because of this, you pin, of course, your launcher to the desktop instead of the program that's getting started - makes sense. In my package manager you can specify a list of applications that are included in the package and, as of now, a small and normal sized tile for OblyTile to generate the start screen tile for each application. I guess i could extend this to support desktop shortcuts, but would have to look into the windows shortcut file format (.lnk) - which I had planned anyway, because I need more control over the created tiles than simply creating them, and they're essentially .lnk files, too. Currently you can put a launcher in the package and run it via the tile that will get created for it - I will show you how that works once I've released the package manager.

As I've written in my todo-list above, distributed repositories are yet to come, I just have to find a way to make the packages unique - maybe by providing a packaging service for the package manager, that spawns a GUID for a given application name, so that the same package doesn't get listed twice in the store. But that in turn would create a new problem: how do you decide from where to get a package? As there is no real server behind an application that could work as some kind of load balancer. I would display a message from which hosting the package is being retrieved upon installation, but rather not show them as separate repositories in the store. But I think it would be reasonable to give the user the opportunity to select from which repository to get the package if he wants to install it - if a package is broken, or not available on the repository automatically selected by the store.

But furthermore, what about a package where someone includes a nice launcher and someone else doesn't? Need to think about it.

Today I will try to get over with packaging most of the remaining apps. After that's done, I will take up getting the package manager ready to release accompanied by a distributed repository mechanism, as those two go hand in hand.

Yeah I did most of it with the new async-feature of C#, for the smaller installations that works perfectly, but larger ones make the application hang - that was to be expected because async just executes on the GUI thread too, just does lazy evaluation. I already moved a part of the installation to background threads, but will move the whole thing. And the last few days were just dirty hacking, so i don't have a centralized installation overview as of yet, that's why the installation messages start bugging once you switch to another app page.

I guess that's somehow possible, just wasn't on the top of my list.

I daresay that's an issue with the not-so-lightning-fast ARM processor, as this runs perfectly fine on my desktop pc. Surely GDI+ related, but i guess there is something that can be done for some smooth animation.

Thank you very much!