TOPIC: WINDOWS NOTEPAD
Using PowerShell to reinstall Windows Apps
9th September 2016Recently, I managed to use 10AppsManager to remove most of the in-built apps from a Windows 10 virtual machine that I have for testing development versions in case anything ugly were to appear in a production update. Curiosity is my excuse for letting the tool do what it did and some could do with restoration. Out of the lot, Windows Store is the main one that I have sorted so far.
The first step of the process was to start up PowerShell in administrator mode. On my system, this is as simple as clicking on the relevant item in the menu popped up by right-clicking on the Start Menu button and clicking on the Yes button in the dialogue box that appears afterwards. In your case, it might be a case of right-clicking on the appropriate Start Menu programs entry, selecting the administrator option and going from there.
With this PowerShell session open, the first command to issue is the following:
Get-Appxpackage -Allusers > c:\temp\appxpackage.txt
This creates a listing of Windows app information and pops it into a text file in your choice of directory. Opening the text file in Notepad allows you to search it more easily, and there is an entry for Windows Store:
Name : Microsoft.WindowsStore
Publisher : CN=Microsoft Corporation, O=Microsoft Corporation, L=Redmond, S=Washington, C=US
Architecture : X64
ResourceId :
Version : 11607.1001.32.0
PackageFullName : Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe
InstallLocation : C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe
IsFramework : False
PackageFamilyName : Microsoft.WindowsStore_8wekyb3d8bbwe
PublisherId : 8wekyb3d8bbwe
PackageUserInformation : {S-1-5-21-3224249330-198124288-2558179248-1001
IsResourcePackage : False
IsBundle : False
IsDevelopmentMode : False
Dependencies : {Microsoft.VCLibs.140.00_14.0.24123.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe,
Microsoft.NET.Native.Framework.1.3_1.3.24201.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe,
Microsoft.NET.Native.Runtime.1.3_1.3.23901.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe,
Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_neutral_split.scale-100_8wekyb3d8bbwe}Using the information from the InstallLocation field, the following command can be built and executed (here, it has gone over several lines, so you need to get your version onto a single one):
Add-AppxPackage -register "C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\AppxManifest.xml" -DisableDevelopmentMode
Once the above has completed, the app was installed and ready to use again. As the mood took me, I installed other apps from the Windows Store as I saw fit.
Windows commands for setting default applications for opening certain file types
18th August 2015On Friday, I was working on a system where a session is instantiated from a stored virtual machine that produces a fresh session every time, meaning that all previous changes get lost. What I have is a batch script that I run to reinstate what I need, and I encountered another task that I wanted it to do.
Part of my work involves the creation of plain text files with the extension lst and this is getting associated with SAS instead of Notepad. While you can reassign such associations using the GUI, it would be a bonus to do it via the command line too, so the assoc and ftype commands caught my interest. The first of these associates a file with a given extension with a desired file type, while the second shows the available file types together with the associated applications that open them. The assoc command also shows all the associations that are in place when it is executed with no parameters, and the ftype command does the same for file types.
Once you have picked out a file type with the ftype command, then the assoc can be used like the following:
assoc .lst=txtfile
The above associates an extension with a file type. In this, .lst files are going to get opened by Notepad because of the txtfile association. Though it did not do what I wanted on Friday due to system lockdown, it is good to know that this is possible and that even the Windows command line supports goodies like these.
Losing formatting with Windows copying and pasting
25th July 2008Copy and pasting between Windows programs can cause unwanted formatting to be carried over. Copying text from Internet Explorer into Outlook is one example of this that I see a lot, and Word to Word does it too. A trick that I picked up for avoiding this copying of formatting comes from a while back: copying into Notepad and pasting from there. Doing the copy/paste shuffle in that way strips off the formatting baggage and allows the default formatting for the particular destination to be applied. There may be other and slicker ways to do this, but what I have described works for me.