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Windows App SDK: Solving 'Class Not Registered' in Unpackaged WinUI 3

  The Deployment Nightmare You have built a robust WinUI 3 application. It runs perfectly in Visual Studio. It runs perfectly when you launch it from your bin folder. You decide to bypass MSIX packaging for a standard "unpackaged" (XCopy or MSI-based) deployment. You copy your release artifacts to a clean client machine, install the Windows App SDK Runtime, and launch the executable. It crashes immediately. No UI, no error dialog. Check the Windows Event Viewer, and you likely see a generic  .NET Runtime  error or an  Application Error  with exception code  0x80040154  (REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG) or  0xE0434352 . This is the "Class Not Registered" error, and it is the single most common hurdle when moving from Packaged (MSIX) to Unpackaged WinUI 3 development. Root Cause Analysis: The Missing Identity To understand the crash, you must understand how WinUI 3 (Windows App SDK) differs from UWP or WPF. WinUI 3 is decoupled from the OS. Its binaries live in...