Installer Failed with Exit Code: 0x80073CF3

This blog explains about windows terminal preview installation issue and how to fix using winget commands.

Introduction

When trying to install the “Windows Terminal Preview” on a Windows 11 VM hosted in Azure, using the Winget (windows package manager) I got the following error.

Winget install Microsoft.WindowsTerminal.Preview.

The error message says.

The installer failed with exit code: 0x80073cf3. This package has a dependency missing from your system.

Just a note, windows terminal preview is a terminal window that allows the users to open command line terminals with multiple shells. In other words, you can open one shell with Windows Power Shell, another tab with Bash, and another tab with Ubuntu shell, etc. More about the Windows terminal can be learned from the references section.

Reason

When trying to install “Windows Terminal Preview” using Winget, Winget tries to look for dependencies on your system, if not found it will get the required software from the app store and try to install just like the NuGet package manager. The issue here is that Winget is trying to get the older version of dependency software Microsoft.UI.XAML which isn’t supported by Windows Terminal Preview.

Fix

The fix is to get the latest version of dependency software which is Microsfot.UI.XAML 2.8 and install it first and proceed with the Windows Terminal Preview using Winget. Below are the commands and the screen capture for reference.

winget install Microsoft.UI.xaml.2.8
winget install Microsoft.WindowsTerminal.Preview

References

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/
• https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/issues/3918