I have a VS2008 setup project, which creates a setup.msi which installs a WinForms application (C#).
Every time I update the version number, the users first have to unin
I am not 100% familiar with VS 2008 setup projects (I use Advanced Installer myself- HIGHLY recommend it BTW; they even have a freeware version!), but I have run into this before and it's not documented very clearly.
There are 4 parts to the version number- as you are well aware I'm sure: Major.Minor.Build.Revision. The REVISION is NOT checked by windows installer. If all you're doing is incrementing the revision, it won't work. You have to increment at least the build of the ProductVersion value.
Hope that helps!
I came here to get help to same problem. After reading linked incredible useful article I suppose my problem was, that I had installed previous version with "Just me" option and the new installer had InstallAllUsers property selected (in Visual Studio project properties). So after uninstalling previous installation from control panel the update now works. Maybe this helps someone.
Don't forget to increment the assemblyFileVersion! If you don't specify the assembly file version then the compiler assumes it to be the same as assemblyVersion. However, if assemblyFileVersion is specified then it must be incremented.
To have it install over the previous version:
Keep in mind, even if you rebuild the solution it doesn't rebuild the setup project. You need to rebuild the setup project as a separate step.
Second, you don't need to Increment AssemblyVersion every time. Set it to something like 2.1.* and it will do it automatically.
The Installer service is making decisions based on the contents of the Upgrade Table, so that's where I would look. Does the table have an entry for your upgrade code, does the product version of the currently installed version fall within the range of versions specified for upgrades, do the attributes look ok (for instance, is the msidbUpgradeAttributesOnlyDetect
attribute not set), and so on.
MSDN describes it all here - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa372379%28VS.85%29.aspx
Semi-answering my own question, just for the benefit of anyone who's interested:
Firstly, I found an incredibly useful article on how MSI updates work.
Secondly, I found InstEd, a rather nice freeware MSI editor, which showed me that there was nothing obviously wrong with my MSI file. (Yes, I could use Orca instead, if I didn't mind downloading the whole Windows SDK to get it.)
Thirdly, and annoyingly, the original problem seems to have fixed itself and I can't reproduce it any more. If it comes back, and if I fix it again, I'll add a comment here!
Anyway, all this brought up a new - arguably worse - problem: the MSI now claimed to update the application but didn't actually install anything! The solution to that is as follows: