Run Local Development and Store-Installed Versions of Windows Store Apps Side-by-Side

01 September 2014 (0)

If you’ve released a Windows Store app and you want to actually use the released version yourself on the same machine you develop the app on, running the dev version from Visual Studio may overwrite the real Store-installed version.

As a workaround you can edit some files to change the package name so when you run it in dev it won’t override the store version. But you need to remember to change back when you release next version.

A while ago I came across a post using various steps to achieve this but it seem a bit complex an involved additional targets, etc.

So I hacked together my own utility: CohabitStoreApp.

It’s a low tech utility that you add as a pre-build step in your Store App project and it does 2 things:

  1. In DEBUG config, adds LOCALDEV to package identity and changed background color to red
  2. in non-DEBUG config removes LOCALDEV from package identity and restores background color

Check out the example app and the readme for more info.

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