Visual Studio project#
Briefcase supports creating a full Visual Studio project for a Windows App. This
project can then be used to build the stub app binary with the briefcase
build
command, or directly from Visual Studio.
Building the Visual Studio project requires that you install Visual Studio 2022 or later. Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition can be downloaded for free from Microsoft. You can also use the Professional or Enterprise versions if you have them.
Briefcase will auto-detect the location of your Visual Studio installation, provided one of the following three things are true:
You install Visual Studio in the standard location in your Program Files folder.
MSBuild.exe
is on your path.You define the environment variable
MSBUILD
that points at the location of yourMSBuild.exe
executable.
When you install Visual Studio, there are many optional components. You should ensure that you have installed the following:
.NET Desktop Development - All default packages
Desktop Development with C++ - All default packages - C++/CLI support for v143 build tools
Briefcase uses the WiX Toolset to build an MSI installer for a Windows App. WiX, in turn, requires that .NET Framework 3.5 is enabled. To ensure .NET Framework 3.5 is enabled:
Open the Windows Control Panel
Traverse to Programs -> Programs and Features
Select “Turn Windows features On or Off”
Ensure that “.NET framework 3.5 (includes .NET 2.0 and 3.0)” is selected.
Icon format#
Windows apps installers use multiformat .ico
icons; these icons should
contain images in the following sizes:
16px
32px
48px
64px
256px
Splash Image format#
Windows Apps do not support splash screens or installer images.
Application configuration#
The following options can be added to the
tool.briefcase.app.<appname>.windows
section of your pyproject.toml
file.
system_installer
#
Controls whether the app will be installed as a per-user or per-machine app. Per-machine apps are “system” apps, and require admin permissions to run the installer; however, they are installed once and shared between all users on a computer.
If true
the installer will attempt to install the app as a per-machine app,
available to all users. If false
, the installer will install as a per-user
app. If undefined the installer will ask the user for their preference.
version_triple
#
Python and Briefcase allow any valid PEP440 version number as a version
specifier.
However, MSI installers require a strict integer triple version number. Many
PEP440-compliant version numbers, such as “1.2”, “1.2.3b3”, and “1.2.3.4”, are
invalid for MSI installers.
Briefcase will attempt to convert your version
into a valid MSI value by
extracting the first three parts of the main series version number (excluding
pre, post and dev version indicators), padding with zeros if necessary:
1.2
becomes1.2.0
1.2b4
becomes1.2.0
1.2.3b3
becomes1.2.3
1.2.3.4
becomes1.2.3
.
However, if you need to override this default value, you can define
version_triple
in your app settings. If provided, this value will be used
in the MSI configuration file instead of the auto-generated value.