Microsoft Shipped WinGet 1.30.90 Preview Ahead of Stable v1.30 Push
Microsoft released the fourth preview build of its Windows Package Manager v1.30 train. If you're following the WinGet pipeline closely, this one lands squarely in the ironing-out-edge-cases phase before the stable v1.30 release drops. The changelog isn't stuffed with shiny new features, but it does include a manifest schema bump to 1.30, security hardening around admin uninstallations, and a long-overdue fix for a crash that was breaking unattended installs.
WinGet has been running a rolling preview cadence all summer, and v1.30 is no exception. Builds 50, 70, 80, and now 90 have shipped over the past month, each tackling a different slice of the codebase. The next milestone is the stable v1.30 release, though Microsoft hasn't pinned down a date. Preview builds like this one are clearly aimed at power users and contributors who don't mind chasing down occasional bugs while the team works out the kinks.
The manifest is bumping to 1.30
The biggest structural change in this preview is the manifest version bump. PR #6379 by Kaleb Luedtke aligns the CLI with a new schema that will accompany the stable v1.30 release. If you're maintaining custom manifests or writing automation scripts that parse them, you'll want to review the updated schema documentation soon. Downstream tooling and third-party wrappers will need to catch up, which usually means a few weeks of compatibility tweaking before the stable rollout.
Security and automation take priority
On the security front, PR #6345 blocks an elevated process from uninstalling a package installed per-user. It's a subtle issue that's been rattling around in Windows package management for years. An admin running winget uninstall could easily trip over a standard user's software, or crash with an access-denied error halfway through. Microsoft is tightening those per-user versus machine-wide boundaries, which tracks with the broader v1.30 schema changes.
Automation teams will probably care more about the crash fix for --disable-interactivity. The combination of that flag and the experimental Resume feature, which lets interrupted downloads pick up where they left off, was throwing an HRESULT 0x8000ffff error. That flag is basically mandatory for CI/CD pipelines and enterprise provisioning scripts, so the three-preview stretch of patches it needed was frustrating but necessary. If you're running unattended installs on flaky networks, the Resume feature is still worth monitoring. It's a solid quality-of-life win for large downloads, but the repeated crash fixes across builds 70, 80, and 90 mean it's not quite ready for production automation yet.
Big picture, it's housekeeping. Microsoft also quietly shipped a wave of CI and test improvements alongside the user-facing changes. NUnit got upgraded to v4, await:strict compliance was enforced, the NuGet packages path fix landed, and the test certificate rotation swapped out old certs for generated ones. On top of that, Dependabot bumped several dependencies in the standalone WinGet Log Viewer tool to patch upstream security advisories. Contributors like JohnMcPMS, Kaleb Luedtke, Flor Chacón, and Tom Plant have been driving most of the commits, with a handful of first-time contributors slipping into the mix.
How to grab it
You can pull this preview build straight from the winget source if you want to test it:
winget install Microsoft.WinGet.Client --source winget --prerelease --accept-package-agreements
Or grab it directly from the GitHub releases page. Verify the install with winget --info, and keep an eye on the v1.30 changelog for the full manifest schema changes. Microsoft has been shipping previews on a roughly weekly cadence, so the stable release is likely closer than it looks. Head here to the full GitHub release if you want to dig into the commit diff yourself.
