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Monday, August 5, 2024

Winget supports now offline download - BUT Microsoft Store for business retires at August 15th 2024

Great news on the one hand side including bad news on the other hands side!

Its great to see that the
Winget command download feature is now fully supported! Over 10 months ago Winget got the download support feature. But the store backend was not able to respond upon the requests. This is now fixed.

At the same time Microsoft decided to retire very soon the Store for Business at August 15th 2024. Here in Central Europe we have currently vacation season so this is really a great surprise and pressure for all SCCM admins taking advantage of the Store for Business to download apps. And there are now a ton of apps you have to take care of especially the built-in ones from Microsoft just think of Photos, Paint, New Teams just to mention a few of them.

For the full blogpost see here:
Downloading Microsoft Store apps using Windows Package Manager - Microsoft Community Hub

And for the commands see here:
winget download command | Microsoft Learn

Huge additional challenge for automation is you need a logged in Entra ID account or you get prompted with the standard Entra ID authentication.

You need to have one of these roles:

  • Global Administrator
  • User Administrator
  • License Administrator


And there is still another drawback which is also not easy to fix for Microsoft itself as this information is dependent from software vendors as well. You do not see the version information of the software available from the store. So you may need to download first every couple weeks the potential update and then afterwards check the version as you see the version as part of the downloaded filename only.

Just continue my research how to fully automate this process. So check back soon.

Monday, February 19, 2024

Win11 cumulative update February 2024 (KB5034765) - cant be installed

In February 2024 MS released a very important cumulative update (which is also fixing 2 major Zero-Day-exploits in the OS with the cumulative update KB5034765 as reported by various sources in the internet)

  • CVE-2024-21412 Internet Shortcut Files Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability
  • CVE-2024-21351 Windows SmartScreen Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability
Officially MS is only reporting on their page publicly this update "solves security issues"




While installing theses updates:

  • 2024-02 Cumulative Update for Windows 11 Version 23H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5034765)
and/or 
  • 2024-02 Cumulative Update for .NET Framework 3.5 and 4.8.1 for Windows 11, version 23H2 for x64 (KB5034467)

I failed as many others already trying to install this update.


During the offline mode installing the update I got this message:

Something didn't go as planned. No need to worry-undoing changes.


After the rollback you will see that the update is still waiting for you to be installed.


Resolution is really simple in this case:
  • Check for the hidden folder: C:\$WinREAgent
  • As admin rename it into something else like "C:\DONOTUSE THIS DOLLARWinREAgentFOLDER" or any other name.

And then let the update run again.

When you re-run the update after renaming the folder its very likely that it works.
So far for me and obviously many others they reported the same issue.

After this action my system reported now no new updates and the Windows version was "Build 22631.3155" as expected (winver.exe).

Image Credits: Image created with Dalle2 prompt: man with black suit and black sunglasses is leaning against a large Windows logo. He is leaning from the right side to the left. On the left side a Windows logo is rushing in to the picture and stopped by the man.