I have discovered the upgrade codes are stored in the following registry location. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UpgradeCodes The registry key name is the upgrade code and the registry key value name is the product code. I can easily extract these values however the codes are stored in a different format. The red circle shows the formatted upgrade code, … Read more
Prerequisities in Visual Studio Projects In Configuration at the top of the dialog, did you try to select either Release or Debug? That should enable the Prerequisites… button. Unecessary, outdated prerequisites? One pet-peeve of mine: is it really necessary to include the .NET runtime as a prerequisite when most users have it installed by their … Read more
Windows 10 – A Version Oddity Disclaimer: this information is to the best of my knowledge as of now (check last edit date). This issue is sort of a “moving target” – things seem to change slightly for every OS release. This is news to me as well, but it seems detecting Windows 10 is … Read more
The problem is that my custom uninstallation action runs after the removal of standard install files That’s because you have scheduled it before InstallFiles, which comes after RemoveFiles in a standard InstallExecuteSequence. You can also open your MSI file in an editor like Orca or InstEd and have a look at the InstallExecuteSequence table. Sort … Read more
The latest supported Visual C++ downloads Runtime Detection Approaches I can find a few ways to detect the presence of the Visual C++ Runtime. Registry Keys used by the VCRedist installer (see section below) Keys mentioned in my original answer – grabbed from this old answer File Presence & Version Check Check for presence of … Read more
Pretty sure you need the product code for this since the upgrade code identifies a family of products, and not a single one. Fire up PowerShell and run this command to get a list of installed products with product code: Get-WmiObject -Class win32_product Here is a different way to get the output in a tabular … Read more
What you said above is incorrect: Custom actions can only be executable files. A batch file is not executable. Custom Actions (even without tools like InstallShield) can be .EXE, VBScript, JScript, or DLL based. If you write a DLL, you can write whatever code you want to call a batch file or make any changes … Read more
For us, the vast majority of the time was spent invoking light (for the linking phase). light is very slow at compressing cabinets. Changing the DefaultCompressionLevel in the .wixproj from high to mszip (or low or none) helps a lot. However, our build was still too slow. It turns out that light handles cabinets independently, … Read more
Example VBScript that you could use to update (or add) a property post-build… Option Explicit Const MSI_FILE = “myfile.msi” Dim installer, database, view Set installer = CreateObject(“WindowsInstaller.Installer”) Set database = installer.OpenDatabase (MSI_FILE, 1) ‘ Update Set view = database.OpenView (“UPDATE Property SET Value=”” & myproperty & “” WHERE Property = ‘MYPROPERTY'”) ‘ .. or Add … Read more
Okay, revisiting this question with my own answer providing nice little VB script that will do all heavy lifting. As mentioned in the original question, the aim was provide a simple solution for sysadmin users to make the updates/changes themselves. Below is a simplified version of the code I’m currently providing to customers Option Explicit … Read more