PACE Suite 4.4. Features New Installation Capturing Wizards and More

We are on a mission to make application packaging easier for everyone – from the most novice user to the most experienced packager. Today, we make another huge step towards our goal and release PACE Suite 4.4. This major release introduces some innovations that ensure our approach while remaining the best-in-class professional way to create and edit packages, continuously makes software packaging simpler.

Support of Universal Windows Platform

Please welcome our most significant feature upgrade – you can now create Universal Windows Platform app packages with PACE Suite. Our core intention was to make the creation of APPX packages as easy as possible, and by using PACE Suite 4.4, you can bring your desktop apps to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) in just a few mouse clicks.The most important innovation that we bring to the creation of UWP app packages is that there is no need to deep-dive into the details of the APPX technology, install Windows SDK components, and prepare peculiar environments to start packaging in this new format. PACE Suite 4.4 can build APPX packages independently in your standard packaging environment under Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 or newer.PACE Suite 4.4 allows you to manage all the application details and sign your APPX package (if necessary) in our familiar, user-friendly interface. Moreover, you can customise app visual assets such as logos, background colour and others. As UWP format has some limitations, you can review them right in PACE Suite before creating your package.

New Installation Capturing Wizard

We want to ensure PACE Suite is the easiest application tool at any given moment. That is why we are continuously enhancing our wizards to guide even novice users to the successful creation of high-quality packages. With this release, we completely redefined our Installation Capturing Wizard.The Wizard begins with inspecting your packaging environment and then tells you which of processes and services you should stop. Whether you don’t know how to configure a proper packaging environment or simply missed something – the Wizard helps you create pure and reliable packages. What is more, it will successfully capture an application that requires a system restart. New Wizard’s mechanism of automatic restore continues from the ‘Installation’ step. Finally, the Wizard allows you to copy all the captured resources to the project folder right after the installation is completed. Need to work under different packaging environments? Seamlessly transfer your captured project with all the source files between them. Deleted some resource you had excluded, and now want to include it back to your package? All source files are safe in the project folder.

A new level of working with MSI tables

PACE Suite stays the most advanced tool for application packaging, and with this release, we do not forget to cater to the needs of our professional users. As direct MSI editing is a crucial feature for seasoned packagers, we enhanced the Tables tab of our MSI Editor.Visual improvements include better highlighting for the selected elements and auto-adjusted columns widths. From the functionality standpoint, you can now see the removed tables with their initial content, reuse identifiers of the removed rows, review and handle elements with their references to other tables during the dropping non-empty MSI tables, and enjoy others usability improvements.

Enhanced Undo/Redo mechanism

We have completely redesigned the Undo/Redo mechanism to ensure maximum stability even for the most sophisticated manipulations.You can now experiment with your packages freely and revert almost all MSI database changesto the previous or initial state (some operations are still irreversible due to their peculiarity; please refer to the Release Notes for the full list).Please read PACE Suite 4.4 Release Notes for the full overview of the new features and some bug fixes. Don’t forget to check our entirely new PACE Suite User Manual – your go-to guide to software packaging with PACE Suite.