The Package Support Framework (PSF) was originally a Microsoft open-source project to help Win32/DotNet applications run when inside an MSIX Container. TMurgent has taken up the support for the PSF in our own fork here on GitHub.
V2025.06.09 of the Package Support Framework is out. Two additions.
Terminate Children
With the surge this year in companies migrating off of App-V to MSIX, we have seen request for App-V features missing from MSIX. This release of the PSF brings along one such feature, known as TerminateChildren.
This feature is needed for scenarios such as Citrix Published Applications and RemoteApp, where the user runs an application on the server but only the visible parts of the application GUI are remoted back to the user. When such an application creates a non-visible, or unnoticed (like a tray icon) child application and the user shuts down the main application, they often believe that they have ended the session, and yet the session remains stuck open.
The new feature affects MSIX packages launched with the PSF, either via PsfLauncher or PsfFtaCom.
This feature is exposed as a new configuration option. When this option is not present, or is specified as disabled, nothing new occurs and the app works as it did previously.
When the option is specified as enabled, the launching process will monitor for the end of the target application process, and then look for any child processes still running. If any are found, the user will see a dialog box with a message that child processes exist and will be terminated. When the user clicks on the OK button, those processes are terminated (killed). If the user needs to save any work from those child processes they should do so prior to clicking the OK button on the dialog box.
Documentation on the feature is in the TerminateChildren section of the Wiki documentation for PsfLauncher here: PsfLauncher · TimMangan/MSIX-PackageSupportFramework Wiki · GitHub
This feature is scheduled to be included in TMEditX version 6.0 and above. For other software that uses this fork of the PSF, consult their release notes.
%MsixPackageFamilyName%
Added a third pseudo-environment variable available for PsfLauncher scripting.
For those unaware, PSF stands for Package Support Framework, an open-source utility that I contribute to for helping traditional Win32 and DotNet applications run inside the MSIX packaging container. This article contains information regarding new contributions.
