Multiple Entry Points

[shmuelie]

If my application has multiple entry points or applications that are package together, would be great to have a way to have the manifest generation support that.

[hamza-usmani]

Can you give an example how you want this to be supported? And what you expect the manifest output to look like?

[shmuelie]

It would mean having multiple Application elements. Easiest way to support this would be to allow the --entrypoint argument to be set multiple times

[azchohfi]

This is not simple, specially because we are using simple template replacements here.
How would this look like? Should the second executable map to an application that have VisualElements or not? Should this work for hostedapps or not? Quite complex matrix here. I wonder if this is too complex a scenario and then you just manually edit the manifest.
Do you have a specific scenario in mind?

[shmuelie]

I was thinking something like say SysInternals, which is a bunch of different applications all bundled together.

[JesseCol]

My two cents -- I can imagine some improvements here, but going down this road of adding more command-line options to manipulate an AppXManifest.xml file doesn't seem like great ROI. @nmetulev mentioned the idea of having a GUI for this instead. I think I like that approach.

[shmuelie]

Not against that, but that would be a different project 😄

[nmetulev]

I wouldn't be against the idea of allowing the --executable option to be passed multiple times which would lead to multiple application entries. But we really need to figure out what that would look like as an output. @azchohfi is right that there is a lot of assumptions we make today, like visual elements. @shmuelie, how would you expect the outputting manifest to look like we two or more executables passed to the command?

[shmuelie]

At the simplest, I would expect them to all have the same visual elements. If we have #149, then it could pull the descriptions etc from each executable directly.