Adding a desktop extension component to your UWP app package is a great way to make your universal app even better on PC by lighting up PC-specific capabilities. Recently on Stackoverflow I have seen a number of questions coming up around this topic, so I decided to write up a quick tutorial to help de-mystify various aspects around this useful feature:

Part 1 – Getting started, hello world (this post)

Part 2 – Launching multiple processes, passing in parameters

Part 3 – Communicating between components

Part 4 – Submitting the package to the Microsoft Store

TL;RD;

Including a desktop extension (‘windows.fullTrustProcess’) in your UWP app package lets your UWP app light up PC-specific capabilities when run on the Windows 10 desktop SKU (including Windows 10 S mode). The extension code runs at the full privileges of the user and has access to all public APIs on the machine. Your app will still be able to run on all SKUs of Windows 10 (e.g. Hololens) – it just won’t light up the desktop extension on those devices. This feature has been introduced with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update 1607 (build 14393, aka Redstone 1).

Show me the code for “Hello World” on github

https://github.com/StefanWickDev/UWP-FullTrust/tree/master/UWP_FullTrust_1

Let me try your “Hello World” app from the Microsoft Store

https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9ND9W9HWSWNS

Project Setup

With Visual Studio 2017 Update 5 (and later), creating a UWP solution with desktop extension is fairly straight forward now. Here is a step-by-step guide to create your first UWP app that lights up powerful desktop code:

Add extension and packaging projects

In your UWP VS solution, add a “Windows Classic Desktop” project to implement your extension. This could be any type of Win32 or .NET project in any language. For “Hello World” I am adding a C# Console project. Next you need to add a “Windows Application Packaging Project” (look for it in the “Windows Universal” category).

So your solution setup looks like in the screenshot below. In order to package both the UWP and the desktop code in one app package, add both as Application references to the Packaging project:

Making the code work together

Now to connect the two projects we need to declare the extension in the package manifest. For this open the Package.appxmanifest file in the Packaging project (“Package”) in XML editing mode and add the following section within the <Application> node:

<Extensions> <desktop:Extension xmlns:desktop="http://schemas.microsoft.com/appx/manifest/desktop/windows10" Category="windows.fullTrustProcess" Executable="DesktopExtension\DesktopExtension.exe" /> </Extensions>

Note that the Packaging project by default adds the ‘runFullTrust’ capability to your manifest, which needs to be declared for this extension. Note that this is a restricted capability and will require an additional on-boarding review for the public Microsoft Store – more details on this in part 4 of this series.

To invoke the extension, we are using the FullTrustProcessLauncher API from the UWP Desktop Extension SDK (which is part of the Windows SDK and should already be on your machine). So let’s add a reference to this SDK from our UWP project (“Hello World”):

Now in your UWP app code, add a line of code to invoke the desktop extension component. It is very important to wrap this into an if-statement as shown, to make sure the app is still universal and can run on all current and future SKUs of Windows 10. We want to launch the extension only on devices that support this contract, in this case on Desktop devices.

if (ApiInformation.IsApiContractPresent("Windows.ApplicationModel.FullTrustAppContract", 1, 0)) { await FullTrustProcessLauncher.LaunchFullTrustProcessForCurrentAppAsync(); }

In our desktop extension code (in Program.cs), we just add a quick piece of code for testing/demo purposes:

class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Console.Title = "Hello World"; Console.WriteLine("This process has access to the entire public desktop API surface"); Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit ..."); Console.ReadLine(); } }

Run, test and debug

First, double check the configuration properties for solution and make sure it looks like this picture for all configurations you care about (architecture & debug/release). Specifically, you want to uncheck the “Deploy” action for the UWP, since deploy will done from the Packaging Project.

Now make sure you have set the “Package” project as the solution’s start up project in VS, and “Hello World” is its application entry point. Now hit F5 and test out your project. Debugging the UWP code continues to work as before. In order to debug the desktop code, launch without debugging and manually attach to the desktop process in VS. The latter should become more seamless in an upcoming update to VS (I believe the work is scheduled for Update 8), which will let you debug across the UWP/Desktop boundary seamlessly.

This is it for my first post in this tutorial series. Now that you have seen “Hello World” I hope you can imagine some of the possibilities this enables. Keep in mind the desktop extension can be any type of project, e.g. a C++ background process, a VB Winforms app, a C# WPF app, etc. – or any combination of those and it has access to the full public API surface on the machine. More on this in the next post.

Also see my earlier blog posts that use the same pattern to implement some concrete desktop scenarios – UWP with Systray Extension & Office Interop with UWP.

Next up: Part 2 – Launching multiple processes, passing in parameters