How to give Read/Write permissions to a Folder during installation using .NET

I guess my other post was deleted for being a little too general, so I’ve refined it below:

The thing to do is make a custom action. It’s pretty straightforward, check out the MSDN walkthrough for writing a C# custom action here. You’ll put your permission-changing code inside the Install method:

Follow the first few steps from the link to get a new installer project referenced from your installer solution. You have to do it this way, so you can build a dll that is called at the end of installation.

Actually setting read/write privileges for Users was a little trickier, and the closest I could get was to set for Authenticated Users. I cobbled together a few other solutions I found on the Internet to come up with this:

public override void Install(IDictionary stateSaver)
{
    // This gets the named parameters passed in from your custom action
    string folder = Context.Parameters["folder"];

    // This gets the "Authenticated Users" group, no matter what it's called
    SecurityIdentifier sid = new SecurityIdentifier(WellKnownSidType.AuthenticatedUserSid, null);

    // Create the rules
    FileSystemAccessRule writerule = new FileSystemAccessRule(sid, FileSystemRights.Write, AccessControlType.Allow);

    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(folder) && Directory.Exists(folder))
    {
        // Get your file's ACL
        DirectorySecurity fsecurity = Directory.GetAccessControl(folder);

        // Add the new rule to the ACL
        fsecurity.AddAccessRule(writerule);

        // Set the ACL back to the file
        Directory.SetAccessControl(folder, fsecurity);
    }

    // Explicitly call the overriden method to properly return control to the installer
    base.Install(stateSaver);
}

Then, when you create your custom action, edit its properties, and add something like this under the CustomActionData property:

/folder="[CommonAppDataFolder][ProductName]"