There comes a time when you’ll want to see a list of all the Metro style app packages installed on your Windows 8 machine. Occasionally you may need to do this in order to fix a registration issue – I’ve seen this happen occasionally in Consumer Preview – manually removing the app package can resolve it.

In addition, there’s a limit to the number of side-loaded apps you can have installed on the Consumer Preview. If you exceed the limit you wont be able to renew your developer licence. I hit this issue at one of our events last week and seeing a complete list of all the installed app packages was very useful.

It’s very easy to see the list:

1/ Open a PowerShell window

2/ Enter “Get-AppxPackage”

You’ll see a complete listing of all the installed packages.

What if you just want to see the ones you’ve created (rather than, for example, pre-installed packages and those downloaded from the Windows Store)? I was playing around with this idea earlier today and came up with the following:

Write-Host; 
Get-AppxPackage | ForEach-Object { 
  if ($_.Publisher.Contains("CN=mormond")) { 
    Write-Host "-- PackageFullName: " $_.PackageFullName; 
    Write-Host "   InstallLocation: " $_.InstallLocation 
  }
};
Write-Host

Just change the publisher name from “mormond” to whatever is appropriate for your apps. The result is a summary list of the PackageFullName + InstallLocation for each app installed and signed with your developer licence. I used it to remove a bunch of app packages for which I’d deleted / moved the project files but I’d failed to uninstall the app itself.