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Questions tagged [windows-installer]

Windows Installer is the installation service provided with Windows, based on the creation and installation of MSI files. In practice there will be a tool you're using to generate the MSI files, and you should tag your question with Windows Installer and that tool (WiX, Visual Studio Setup Project, InstallShield, Advanced Installer etc). Your issue may be with building, designing, or installing MSI files.

From the MSDN documentation:

Microsoft Windows Installer is an installation and configuration service provided with Windows. The installer service enables customers to provide better corporate deployment and provides a standard format for component management. The installer also enables the advertisement of applications and features according to the operating system.

Installer also handles registry related changes.

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Mark MSI so it has to be run as elevated Administrator account

I have a CustomAction as part of an MSI. It MUST run as a domain account that is also a member of the local Administrators account. It can't use the NoImpersonate flag to run the custom action as NT Authority\System as it will not then get access to…
Ryan
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Is it safe to use autogenerated GUID on Component tags

My scenario is this: I want the installer to completely remove the old version (all files except those created by the application during its lifetime) and replace it with the new version. In my Wix script I use auto-generated GUID (asterisk) for…
Marcus Frenkel
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Include MajorVersion etc in filename (OutputName) when building MSI file (wix project)

In my Defines.wxi I have: In my MyProject.Setup.wixproj I have: MyProject Package Is it possible to include…
user479911
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What's the difference between an EXE and a MSI installer?

I've created an installation package using Installaware and generated an EXE and a MSI. The EXE is 3.1MB and the MSI is only 265K. Why is there such a big difference in size?
MrB
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Specifying c:\ProgramData folder in Setup project?

I am using a Windows Installer deployment project in VS 2010 to create an installer for a small demo project. The demo needs to install a SQL Compact database file (MyData.sdf). The demo can't install the database to the application folder on the…
David Veeneman
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Installing a new version of a deployment project over old version

I have a deployment project which will not let me install over an older version. The msi file says to uninstall the program first from Add/Remove programs. This is not a good user experience. How can I do it so that the installer will simply remove…
sbenderli
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WiX - CustomAction ExeCommand - Hide Console

We've gotten a custom action that runs command-line to work as such:
jonathanpeppers
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WiX alternatives?

I have tried to build a MSI package for my Windows Service with WiX for a couple of days but have big problems to get it the way I need. The documentation is very bad and then XML structure just dont feels structured. I really don't see how they…
Banshee
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How to get InstallShield LE to uninstall the existing installation automatically?

Is this possible? All I can see searching around is basically that I need to use 3rd party tools (e.g. Orca) to get GUIDs from my existing MSIs and configure InstallShield with these to uninstall the existing version. I've tried one or two of these…
DaveDev
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Integrating Wix with MSBuild

we are looking to automate an MSI generation for a product we are developing. Currently we have MSBuild building out the source to a network location, this is fine for testing but when it comes to releasing the software we will need to wrap it in…
Brendan
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WIX custom action debugging doesn't work

I have tried to debug my custom action. I put Debugger.Break() into custom action cs. When I build custom action it creates this files: myCustomAction.dll myCustomAction.CA.dll myCustomAction.pdb In wix project I reference myCustomAction.CA.dll…
Simon
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LGHT0094: Unresolved reference to symbol 'WixComponentGroup:Product.Generated' in section 'Product:*'

I'm having this error on one of build servers. All other servers build it ok. Any ideas what can be wrong?
user626528
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How do I install to LocalAppData folder?

Following directory setting works perfectly for me. However, when I tried changing…
Deqing
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Wix: Using KeyPath on Components, Directories, Files, Registry, etc, etc

After reading this answer on "one file per component" approach when using WiX, I was curious to find out what are the best practices when using KeyPath attribute on other elements including Component, Directory, Registry etc, etc. I am interested in…
zam6ak
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Not enough storage is available to complete this operation

Environment: Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 Windows XP WPF Desktop Application using .NET 4.0 We have a desktop application which plays a video. This video is part of a project and the project is packaged into the installer. Every once in a while…
Ranjith Venkatesh
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