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I have an application which is deployed with an msi installer. It's version 2. When installing this latest version of this installation, the installer copies everything into the program folder (dlls,exe,resourcefiles).

But when upgrading this application from Version 1 to 2, some strange things happen. The upgrade is good, and it removes the previous files and copies the DLLs into the folder and completes the installation wizard.

When I now look in the installation folder ONLY the DLLs are present. When I run the application from the start menu for the first time, it fires a MSI shortcut and the installer shows up again to do some configuration. Now it copies the executable and the resource files and starts the application.

Why doesn't the installer copy everything on the upgrade? I want to this to be the behaviour because the users who will start this app for the first time may not have sufficient access rights for this kind of operation

Martin
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1 Answers1

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During an upgrade Windows Installer uses the file versioning rules to determine if a file is installed or not. To install all files during an upgrade you can make sure that:

  • all files are placed in components that have a versioned file as key member
  • all key member files have a higher file version compared to your old installation

Windows Installer evaluates if a component will be installed or not based on it's key member. So if the key member file has a higher version than what's on the machine, that component is installed.

Another solution is to set the Version column in File table to a high value, for example 65535.65535.65535.65535. This way Windows Installer will always consider the file in your MSI newer than what's installed on the target machine.

Cosmin
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  • hello and thanks. but the files are copied correctly. It's just that some of the files is not copied before I launch the application from the startup menu AFTER the installation is complete and closed. (apparently, from an MSI shortcut on start menu). How can I copy every file I need during installation? – Martin Jul 05 '11 at 10:31
  • If some files are missing, it's because they were not installed. They were not installed because of how Windows Installer handles upgrades (what I explained in my post). When launching your application from start menu, Windows Installer automatically performs a repair to install them. – Cosmin Jul 05 '11 at 10:36
  • maybe that explains it. It used to be a vs2005 sln and now it is a vs2010 sln with Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Projects RTW. Maybe something went wrong with the conversion. i'll check it out, thanks again – Martin Jul 05 '11 at 10:42
  • No, the conversion doesn't matter. Try creating a verbose log for the upgrade. You will most likely see that some components are not installed because "the same component with higher versioned keyfile exists". – Cosmin Jul 05 '11 at 10:51
  • I just realized now that all the files in the folder after upgrade is new files that didn't exist in the previous installation. All files that existed in directory before installation is missing. – Martin Jul 05 '11 at 11:16
  • From the log I read this on every file that existed before: " ....MyApp.exe.config; Overwrite; Won't patch; Existing file is unversioned and unmodified - no source file hash provided to compare" – Martin Jul 05 '11 at 11:22
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    Thanks for helping me out. Actually, the real problem was when I upgraded a deployment project from vs2005 to vs2010 something strange happened and I had to set a property "BacwardCompatibleIDGeneration" to true. And after adding REINSTALLMODE=amus everything went smooth :) – Martin Jul 07 '11 at 06:04