The winget PowerShell commandlets now use C#, so I should add an option for people to use them instead of my own code where available (mainly when getting the list of available packages, which would be way faster and I should be able to still get manifests somehow, or at least the descriptions and most-used parts of the manifests, out of another command).

[DrewNaylor]

This is in a recent winget 1.5 release: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/releases/tag/v1.5.1572 . Using the PowerShell commandlets will be optional where possible, but some more-complicated features may require them as otherwise I'd have to parse text, and I don't want to do that. Will keep the code that doesn't use the PowerShell commandlets around for both compatibility and just if people don't want to use/have trouble with the PowerShell commandlets, though.

[DrewNaylor]

Wait, I could just do the command and have PowerShell convert it to JSON without having to add PowerShell's libraries directly and I can keep using .NET Framework. Just will have to take the JSON returned and put it into the DataTable and somehow figure out how to get the descriptions and details from each package (as the focused package is changed, for full details).

[DrewNaylor]

Wait, they don't have a way to get the description yet, so I'd have to still deal with the winget.exe output or extract the manifests. Could always do that thing where I take all the manifests and wrap them into a JSON file that's served from a public server using that one company I forgot about.

[DrewNaylor]

Oh, I just realized I can use this to say which applications in the list are installed using Get-WingetPackage (will probably have to go check each package against that commandlet as we're adding them to see if it's in there, and somehow we'll have to keep track of which packages weren't able to be marked like this as there could be more we'll just have to list).

Apparently Get-WingetPackage also allows you to filter for updatable packages, which will allow a "mark all updates" button like Synaptic to exist, in addition to a separate updater app like MintUpdate as I've mentioned before.