So after going on a hiatus from building any new UWP Apps, I come back to find the instrumentation space nearly as confusing as when I left it 9 months ago. Back in March Microsoft—in all their wisdom—decided to neuter Application Insights from working with ‘Device Apps’ in favor of their latest acquisition ‘HockeyApp’. This decision confused and angered me so much I decided to take a break from UWP development. Well, I’m back and it turns out I wasn’t the only one scratching their heads about this decision and Microsoft made an about face in June saying both App Insights and HockeyApp could be used together [for the time being].

In the meantime, I notice that the Application Insights for Windows Apps nugget package received one update in July while the HockeyApp SDK nugget has received 4 updates between July and September. I suspect that Microsoft is going to let the Application Insights client SDK die on the vine while they scramble to get the HockeyApp SDK up to speed.

So I decided to take a look at the HockeyApp SDK to see 1) what the differences are in functionality and 2) whether I could get by with only using it and forgo any further ties to Application Insights. This is a new app after all, so I have an opportunity to start from a clean slate.

Doing a simple nuget search I came back with the following results:

I accidentally installed the “WINRT” package (I love how they use ALLCAPSNOSPACES for all the platform namespace segments /s). I shortly realized that I had missed the package with the “UWP” in the name. That should surely be the one, right? Sigh…yes, the branding dysphoria affects even the best of us. I discovered this by actually RTM here, otherwise I probably would’ve tried to wire things up with the “WINRT” library. ^_^