MSIX - The Newly Crowned King [Part2]

This is the second and final part of the series "MSIX - The New Land Registry System". Let's continue our journey from where we left in Part1; covering rest of the story 

• Starting with a short introduction to AppX
• Touch base on AppX, UWP and Windows Store issues
• Move on to The Rebellion phase;
• The negotiations phase where authorities had to relax strict rules to satisfy rebel's demands; 
• The Cops (or rather "The Secret Agents" as they kept changing their name Project C / Centennial / Desktop Bridge / Desktop App Converter), 
• Find out where did the cops fail 
• Finally, The Rise of MSIX

We will end this blog with my forecast on the newly crowned King - MSIX. 

There are lots of things to cover in this part so the blog will be a little lengthy. But I'll try to keep it as short as possible (yeah, I don't like lengthy blogs either). For those who want to read these topics in detail, I'll provide relevant links to Microsoft's website. Right, so let's get started with AppX first.

MSIX - The New Land Registry System [Part 1]

In this blog series, I am penning down very crucial technical issues which lead to MSIX using a land registry system's analogy. Yeah, I know this sounds silly but I like comparing technology with day-to-day systems as the human brain's logic always remains the same. In this first post (part 1), we will discuss the issues with old style MSIs which lead to a new way of containerizing applications. In my next post (part 2), we will explore what challenges this new approach possessed and how it eventually evolved into MSIX.

LinWin Experiment 1 : Virtualized WSL Launcher

In this blog, I am going to pen down my first experiment with Windows Subsystem for Linux where I virtualized WSL's launcher component. I'll start with summarizing my WSL learning (with links to Microsoft's site) and then take you through the setup and how I ended up virtualizing WSL launcher. I am yet to analyse it fully, so I'll be posting followup blogs as I move on with my experiments. I would really like to get feedback from those who experimented with WSL earlier. I've used tools like APIMonitor, WinDbg, ProcessHacker and Cloudhouse's Virtualization engine while trying these experiments.

WSL in a Nutshell

Windows Subsystem for Linux is a feature released in 2016 by Microsoft to run Linux binaries natively on Windows 10. I've written this blog while doing some experiments on WSL to summarise key points which I've learned. These are taken from Channel 9 videos where Microsoft's WSL team members have explained the concepts clearly. Also, Jessie Frazelle's blog is a good read to understand the internals. 

What's Next.. "Cosmopolitan OS"?

A disclaimer first; this is a debatable blog as I am penning down my views on what I see is needed in future operating systems. These are my thoughts on the capabilities an OS should have and is inspired by Microsoft's WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) feature. I am open to differing views, so feel free to share your opinion on this.

Let's start with an analogy (I am sure you might have guessed it by looking at the title). Just like a cosmopolitan city is the one where people coming from different cultures and countries live and work together; we aren't far from the time when an operating system will be able to accommodate applications coming from different operating systems (i.e. built for other OS). An operating system where all the applications can live and run on the same kernel. I termed it as a "Cosmopolitan OS".