I have a program that is being installed using a Deployment Project (Microsoft Visual Studio Installer Projects 2022).
Due to business changes, I need to break this one program up into several new programs. A similar scenario would be like when Apple discontinued iTunes and replaced it with the Music, TV, iBooks, and Photos apps.
When our clients install one of the new programs, the original will still be there, causing confusion about which one they should be using (using the analogy above, you wouldn't want iTunes still hanging around after the new apps were installed). The new projects have a different UpgradeCode from the original, so the installer doesn't recognize it as an older version of the same program (this makes sense) so it does not automatically uninstall it.
Getting the word out to clients that they need to uninstall the old version manually is difficult and unreliable.
Is there any way to add an action to the Deployment Projects for the new programs so that it knows to look for and uninstall the original program as part of the new installation?
To be clear: this isn't about upgrading an existing program. This is about replacing an old program (that has different GUIDs) with an entirely separate program (multiple replacement programs, actually). So the normal mechanism that automatically uninstalls previous versions isn't applicable to this problem.
