The Universal Task Manager (uTaskManager) is a Universal Windows Platform app that provides much of the same functionality as the traditional Win32 Desktop Task Manager app. Note that this is not intended as a replacement for the traditional Task Manager. Instead, the app serves 3 main purposes:
- as an exploration of the diagnostic and package manager APIs;
- to fill the gap on devices that don't support the traditional Task Manager app (eg, on Xbox);
- to provide a way to examine the metadata of installed MSIX-packaged apps, including their capabilities and extensions.
The app exercises the diagnostic and deployment APIs to gather diagnostic information on installed and running apps (both Win32 and UWP), including resources usage (CPU, memory, disk), execution state, background tasks, and so on. The Processes tab lists all running processes (packaged or unpackaged). On the Apps tab, you can select an app, and then drill down on the Details tab to get further information about the state of the app. You can also suspend/resume/terminate any non-system packaged app. The app also reports on installed packages, including Apps, Frameworks, Optional Packages and Resource Packages. From this list, you can activate any packaged app.
On first launch, the app will show a user-consent dialog, to grant permissions to access information about other running apps. If the user denies this request, then the running app information will be restricted to the current app only. Note: the user can always enable or disable this permission by going to the Settings app | Privacy | App diagnostics at any time. Also note that this permission is not available on Xbox, so on Xbox both the Process and Apps lists are restricted to just this app.
Note: on Windows 10 builds prior to 19041, there's a platform bug in fetching process information which will eventually cause the app to crash. For this reason, the timer-based auto-refresh on the Processes list is disabled on those builds, to reduce (but not eliminate) the chances of hitting the bug: you can refresh the list manually instead.
