Is it possible to deploy multiple versions of a UWP application for a user to run at the same time?

Question

We currently have an internal WPF application that serves the business in different ways for different departments. We have a staged rollout process that takes changes through the following steps:

• Development (local)
• Alpha testing
• Beta testing
• Live

Developers need to be able to run all of these versions of the application, and some users access the Beta version to sign off new features.

Currently, this is done through a Launcher application deployed via ClickOnce, which downloads and runs the client binaries for the selected version. Each version of the application is hosted by a corresponding web service on the appropriate server (alpha, beta, live).

Does anyone know how this could be done through UWP? We want to future-proof the application and think about support for surface, windows phone etc. But in all cases, developers and users should be able to access the different versions of the application, sometimes even running them at the same time.

Is there support for this kind of concurrent deployment of multiple versions of the same UWP application?

Answer 1

For development these applications may be installed via powershell. From the AppStore you would only get the latest released version but locally you can do what you want.

The required powershell scripts are provided when you deploy the files to the local file system with visual studio. They will even prompt you to create a local developer key if required for your machine.