Discussion: Decouple MSIX from AppContainer

Currently, there is no way to run an app in an AppContainer without it being packaged into an MSIX. This has a few major downsides:

1. Slow inner loop. VS has to do the loose file deployment every time you build/F5.
2. Can't run an app container app from the command line.

It would be great if MSIX was solely a technology for packaging and submitting apps to the store (or sideloading), and didn't have an impact on the runtime behavior of the app.

With Project Reunion and WinUI3, we now are trying to support 3 different app models:

1. Packaged Desktop
2. Unpackaged Desktop
3. Packaged UWP

It would make tooling simpler to just have a single build/deploy model for all of these.

Related Links

microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml#2500 (comment)