How to Dockerize windows application

Question

i have a windows application which I want to containerize. Its a windows desktop application (not web application). I did some searching and found very little about containerizing desktop application. The application which I want to containerize works fine on WindowsServerCore. I have Windowsservercore image on my machine.

I want to know how can I go about containerizing it. Any documentation or useful videos are available? when i completed dockerfile can i interact with my application gui??? how???

Answer 1

You can find tons of example of WindowsServiceCore-based applications in StefanScherer/dockerfiles-windows

You need to write a Dockerfile (like for instance diskspd/Dockerfile where you copy/unzip/install the application you need.

FROM microsoft/windowsservercore:10.0.14393.1770

SHELL ["powershell", "-Command", "$ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop'; $ProgressPreference = 'SilentlyContinue';"]

ENV DISKSPD_VERSION 2.0.17

RUN Invoke-WebRequest $('https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/DiskSpd-a-robust-storage-6cd2f223/file/152702/1/Diskspd-v{0}.zip' -f $env:DISKSPD_VERSION) -OutFile 'diskspd.zip' -UseBasicParsing ; \
    Expand-Archive diskspd.zip -DestinationPath C:\ ; \
    Remove-Item -Path diskspd.zip ; \
    Remove-Item -Recurse armfre ; \
    Remove-Item -Recurse x86fre ; \
    Remove-Item *.docx ; \
    Remove-Item *.pdf

ENTRYPOINT [ "C:\\amd64fre\\diskspd.exe" ]

That being said, a full GUI support for windowscoreserver is still requested:
"Create base container with full GUI support".