Distributing a Windows Desktop App Safely from Japan — Code Signing and the SmartScreen Reality (2026)

"I want to distribute a Windows app, but I don't want security software to block it." For a Japanese company, the shortest path to meeting that requirement collapses to roughly two options: ship MSIX through the Microsoft Store, or sign an installer with a CA-issued code-signing certificate and serve it from your own site. But on Windows since 2024, buying an EV certificate no longer buys an instant SmartScreen bypass, and Microsoft's cheap cloud signing service, Azure Trusted Signing, excludes Japanese organizations. We assemble the 2026 realistic path end to end, from certificate selection through signing, distribution, and SmartScreen reputation operations.

Distributing Windows Desktop Apps Through Customer Intune Tenants — A Software Vendor Playbook for Win32, MSIX, Code Signing, and Updates

If your customers use Microsoft Intune, almost every path to their Windows desktops in 2026 leads to the Win32 app format. LOB has narrow scope, Store for Business is gone, and MSIX only fits if your app is container-friendly. The vendor's job is to hand IT a signed MSI, an `.intunewin`, detection rules, ADMX templates, and silent install commands. This post lays out the software vendor playbook, including the geographic limits on Azure Artifact Signing (formerly Trusted Signing) that bite vendors based outside the US/EU.

How Per-Machine Windows Apps Silently Auto-Update — Three Patterns Learned from Chrome, Slack, and VS Code

Per-user auto-update is straightforward. The moment you try silent auto-update on a per-machine install, without a UAC prompt for a standard user, the problem becomes hard. This post reads across how Chrome, Slack, VS Code, Docker Desktop, and others actually solve it, and reduces those implementations to three patterns: an Omaha-style SYSTEM service, MSIX platform delegation, and MDM redistribution.