Applications don't refresh install state based on actions taken outside of Dev Home

[krschau]

Dev Home version

0.11

Steps to reproduce the bug

Applications don't refresh install state based on actions taken outside of Dev Home

[AmelBawa-msft]

Dev Home gets the information about installed packages from winget's local catalog. We connect to this catalog in three cases:

• When Dev Home launches
• When the WindowsPackageManagerServer.exe (COM Server) terminates
• When the user installs an application

In the past (last year) catalog connection was expensive (~4-10 seconds before performing a search), and that was raised as a concern as a slow load-time for the App Install page. However, I have not tested the performance with newer versions of AppInstaller.

Some options I see that can help with this issue:

• Request an API from WinGet team to listen for app status change (install/uninstall/update) and integrate it into Dev Home
• Refresh the local catalog every time we visit the App Install page (I would need to test the added time to re-establish the connection)
• Add a "Refresh" button in the page to allow the user to manually refresh the packages on the page to get the latest changes from the local catalog.

Adding @shakersMSFT to help with the options we can explore.