Desktop App Converter fails on Windows 10 15063.483 and later: how to solve it

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Update on 04/12/2017: the image BaseImage-15063-UPDATE.wim has been deprecated. If you're using the Fall Creators Update and you need to setup the Desktop App Converter, you just have to download the standard image for build 15063 from the following website: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/dac

If you’re working with the Desktop Bridge and, as a good practice, you always keep your Windows 10 installation up-to-date, you may have noticed that starting from the servicing update 15063 .486 that was released a while ago, the Desktop App Converter stopped to work properly.

The symptom is a failure in the step Starting the Isolated Environment. After a while, the Desktop App Converter always fails in this step, reporting in the logs and in the PowerShell prompt an error like the following one:

 System.Management.Automation.RuntimeException: DesktopAppConverter : error 'E_STARTING_ISOLATED_ENV_FAILED': 
Failed to start the isolated environment. See inner exception for more details. ---> 
System.Management.Automation.MethodInvocationException: Exception calling "Start" with "0" argument(s): 
"One or more errors occurred." ---> System.AggregateException: One or more errors occurred. ---> 
Microsoft.Windows.ComputeVirtualization.HcsException: HCS function call returned error. ---> 
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: The wait operation timed out. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070102)

Today, the Desktop Bridge team has released an updated base image for the DAC which solves this problem. So, if you are one of the developers who is facing this issue, here are the steps to solve it:

  1. Go to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=55325 and download the new image called BaseImage-15063-UPDATE.wim

  2. Open the Desktop App Converter with Administrative rights (right click on the icon in the Start menu, choose More –> Run as administrator).

  3. First, you need to cleanup the old image, otherwise the tool won’t be able to install the new one (since they are both based on the same base build version, 15063). To do it, you need to perform the following command:

     DesktopAppConverter -Cleanup "ExpandedImage" -Verbose

  4. Once the operation is completed, you are ready to install the new image. To do it, keep your focus on the Desktop App Converter command prompt and launch the following command:

     DesktopAppConverter -Setup -BaseImage "x:\<full_path>\BaseImage-15063-UPDATE.wim" -Verbose

Of course, replace x:\<full_path> with the real path where you have downloaded the new base image in the first step. The operation will take a while, since it will take care of expanding the new base image and setting up again the Container in the right way.

That’s all. Now you can try again to convert an existing installer in the usual way (as explained, for example, in the following blog post) and, this time, the operation should complete without any errors and you should get, as output, your packaged version of your Win32 application ready to be distributed using the Store or any other existing distribution channel.

Happy conversion!