FreeCAD & Windows Store

[himbeerhacks]

Hey!
Are there any plans on releasing FreeCAD in the Windows Store?
Blender was published on the Windows Store this month so I think it should be possible to do this for FreeCAD too. This would increase the ease of use (especially the installation and updating process) a lot.

[Kunda1]

Hey!
Are there any plans on releasing FreeCAD in the Windows Store?
Blender was published on the Windows Store this month so I think it should be possible to do this for FreeCAD too. This would increase the ease of use (especially the installation and updating process) a lot.

What's involved? + Would you be willing to do some footwork to help make it happen?

[freedman]

Be sure and read the contract fine print for listing stuff in their store; Typically they only want your money and your data.

[himbeerhacks]

Hey!
Are there any plans on releasing FreeCAD in the Windows Store?
Blender was published on the Windows Store this month so I think it should be possible to do this for FreeCAD too. This would increase the ease of use (especially the installation and updating process) a lot.

What's involved? + Would you be willing to do some footwork to help make it happen?

I have some experience with developing Windows Apps so I would help to make it happen. I'm not sure yet how much work needs to be done because I haven't had a look at the FreeCAD source code yet.

Is there anybody I can get in touch with for more details? Maybe one of the developers?

[bernd]

Is there anybody I can get in touch with for more details? Maybe one of the developers?

just ask at at the developer forum https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewforum.php?f=10

[sgrogan]

Is there anybody I can get in touch with for more details? Maybe one of the developers?

I'm not a developer, but I do package FreeCAD for Win, what do you need to know?

[himbeerhacks]

Is there anybody I can get in touch with for more details? Maybe one of the developers?

I'm not a developer, but I do package FreeCAD for Win, what do you need to know?

So one thing I need to know is, what is part of the FreeCAD Libpack? This is probably the most difficult thing, because there may be dependencies that are hard (or even impossible) to package into a UWP app.

btw the link to the libpack on this wiki page https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/Compile ... ith_VS2013 isn't working any more, so I wasn't able to compile FreeCAD on my machine to do some tests.

[sgrogan]

So one thing I need to know is, what is part of the FreeCAD Libpack?

The Libpack contains all the dependencies to build and run FreeCAD it is pretty heavy weight QT, OpenCascade, Python, etc.
Only a subset of this needs to be packaged for runtime, basically the contents of the bin sub-directory less the debug dll's.
I fixed the link.

[himbeerhacks]

Ok thank you, is this part of the FreeCAD installer executable? Do you know if the installer is able to run in silent mode?
If this applies, it should be possible to package FreeCAD in a uwp package.
I'm currently setting up an environment to test this, I will post my results as soon as possible.

[sgrogan]

Ok thank you, is this part of the FreeCAD installer executable? Do you know if the installer is able to run in silent mode?

Yes, all the necessary runtime stuff is in the installer (it also installs the MSVC redistributable) it can be run in silent mode.
We use NSIS to make the installer, so its just a zip archive, you can unpack it with 7zip or the like to examine it's contents.