Opening an MSIX install location to troubleshoot

When you’re starting to work with MSIX you will soon find out that MSIX files, like appx files, get installed to the folder
C:\Program Files\WindowsApps.

When you want to check the content of your installed MSIX Package and do some analysis or troubleshooting you will not be able to open that folder easily, even when you are an admin. But you have the necessary rights to open to the actual subfolder where the package is installed. But how should you know what the foldername is?

The foldername is the so called PackageFullName, but what is that?

It’s stitched together like that “%Name%_%Version%_%Architecture%_%PublisherID%

Once you have installed your MSIX, you can use PowerShell to get that information.
Just type:

Get-AppxPackage –Name %PartOfYourPackageName%

There you will also see the InstallLocation Property and that is where the MSIX content is stored. You could now copy that path and past it to your explorer Window and voila you can now see the installed content of your package.

But if you’re like me and like it a bit more comfortable you could just create a small PowerShell script like that

$SelectedPackage = Get-AppxPackage | Select-Object -Property Name,Version,Publisher,InstallLocation  | Out-GridView -Title "Open install location" -OutputMode Single
explorer.exe $SelectedPackage.InstallLocation

Now when you run that script you can filter for your package Name and then select it.

After clicking on OK, an explorer Window opens automatically in the correct install location.

Hope this is helpful for you and thank you for spending your time with reading this blog.

• About
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Pascal Berger

Principal Workplace Consultant at baseVISION AG

I work since 1998 in IT. Since then I have worked in numerous Deployment Projects. My specialties are SCCM, MDT, Hardware Integration, the Windows Client OS, PowerShell and mainly Software Packaging with MSI, App-V and MSIX.

I’m also the Service Owner of WimAsAService

Latest posts by Pascal Berger (see all)

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