New InstallAware X17: Future-Proof, Azure Trusted, Dongle-Free Code Signing


InstallAware Software, the technology leader in software installation, repackaging, and virtualization solutions for app developers and enterprises, today launched InstallAware X17.

InstallAware X17 confers instant trust on packages it signs via its implementation of Azure Trusted
Signing, which grants complete trust with purely electronic signing. This separates it from ordinary verification certificates, which are easy to obtain but require weeks to months of use before being trusted by Windows, and also unlike Extended Verification certificates, which do confer the benefit of instant trust but at the great inconvenience of physical dongle requirements (destroying build
automation/cloud capabilities).

InstallAware X17 also future-proofs its code signing process by implementing new Code Signing Hooks, so that any time the IDE would sign a binary, the hooks trigger and execute any number of custom command lines. This makes it a triviality to integrate with any present or future vendor and/or standard, and also to seamlessly sign any file being packaged as a natural part of your builds.

Further, InstallAware X17 updates its compression engine for the first time this decade, addressing the emerging challenges and leveraging the key inventions of modern processors and operating systems. A 30% per-core CPU speedup accelerates even non-parallelizable workloads, ensuring the swiftest processing times in all of your scenarios. Native compression processes for x86, AMD64, and aarch64 platforms ensure code runswithout any emulation, ensuring the highest execution speeds on raw-metal without any overhead.

While modern operating systems schedule tasks on efficiency and low-power efficiency cores, in a well-
intentioned effort to save power; this often destroys build performance (especially when build tasks run in
the background and have no user visible pixels). InstallAware X17 schedules your compression jobs on
your CPU’s performance cores, preventing any efficiency relegation, even for automated build pipelines. New compression dictionary sizes of 2 GB, 3 GB, and 4 GB ensure you’re always building your smallest
setups. And new binary filters for aarch64 executables complete this round of InstallAware X17’s compression upgrades, eliminating common instructions that are native to this proliferating processor architecture.

Windows 11 24H2 and Windows Server 2025 are newly supported official deployment targets in
InstallAware X17. You may also configure Windows Features and Server Roles (for all released Windows
versions) directly from your setups. This offers the convenience of an interface matching Windows’s own feature selection user experience, thus helping you provision x86/AMD64/aarch64 Windows installations with IIS Hyper-V, PDF, and any other platform features your application deployments may require.

InstallAware X17 concludes its roundup of new features by adding in support for the latest application
runtimes shipping from Redmond, including .NET 9.0.0, .NET 8.0.11, .NET 7.0.20, .NET 6.0.36, and
Visual C++ Runtimes 2015-2024. These runtimes are added to existing projects in a single-click, and
optionally downloaded at installation time only when required. They may be shared across multiple setup
projects when placed inside Web Media Blocks, always securely signed and redundantly downloaded.



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