SLW 20: WinGet with Demitrius Nelon

Sliding Windows

software developer named Keivan Beigi, who inspired Microsoft to create their own implementation. Keivan was guest on the "Sliding Windows" podcast, episode 18: https://www.slidingwindows.de/slw18/ Demetrius talks about his personal background and career journey, mentioning his service in the U.S. Navy and his work at various technology companies, including Microsoft, VMware, and Amazon. Prior to the employment of Demitrius Microsoft saw the value in Keivans primal AppGet implementation and used it as a template for their own package manager, initially named AppInstallerCLI due to its positioning under the umbrella of Microsofts sideloading application named AppInstaller. During its early days the AppInstallerCLI/WinGet was targeted as a package manager for developers. Demetrius joined the team in December 2019, and the initial preview launch of WinGet took place at the Build 2020 conference. Compared to Chocolaty WinGet eliminates arbitrary code by using a declarative syntax called a manifest. Demitrius discusses the security precautions taken to ensure the safety of the manifests and the considerations for vendors hosting the manifest and installer without independent verification. Thorsten shares his perspective on how WinGet feels similar to a Linux tool with its syntax and approach. Demitrius explains the focus on providing options and achieving functional parity in PowerShell. They discuss the desire for proper APIs for extension and the impedance between PowerShell syntax and the WinGet CLI syntax. Demitrius acknowledges the alpha stage of the PowerShell module for WinGet and seek feedback on the names, nouns, and verbs used in the cmdlets. Finally, they stress the goal of making software installation and management easier and express the desire for a more extensive catalog and better-behaved software. They highlight the contributions from the community, such as the implementation of a log directory opening command.