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Requiring source packages during installation , repairs , and even uninstall are common occurrences for some customers. The core issue is that Windows Installer needs the source location of the package and its files to install - and can't find them automatically - when attempting to restore the machine...

These days it’s more common to install products composed of more than one installer package. Modern applications are often a loose fitting of localized components and being authored into a single package just isn’t practical. For example, a localized application will undoubtedly have neutral or single...

Shared components define shared resources. It might seem obvious, but it’s important to understand that whatever you do to a shared resource during the installation of one product affects those same resources for any other product. For example, when upgrading one product to update files shared with another...

While we hope you’ll love Visual Studio 2010 for all the application development it enables with powerful features and a robust extension model that enables great extensions like the Productivity Power Tools , if you ever need to uninstall Visual Studio it can be difficult. If you’ve ever tried to remove...

Major upgrades are Windows Installer products that can be installed like any other product with the added benefit of removing one ore more related products. For example, version 2 of a product can be installed on a clean machine, or on a machine with version 1 already installed and will remove version...

When I announced that Visual Studio 2008 SP1 RTM will install over SP1 beta , we were on track to make that reality. However, when SP1 beta shipped we found that adding new components into existing features was causing a prompt for source for non-default installations of Visual Studio 2008. To fix this...

The tool msizap.exe that is available in the Windows SDK and elsewhere on the web (remember to always download from a trusted source) is a powerful but dangerous tool that is often used to quickly and casually, and can leave your machine in a corrupted state if not used correctly. The same is true for...

A lot of customers have recently started seeing the following errors, all stating in various ways that Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 failed to install. You may also see this when attempting to install other updates on top of .NET 2.0 SP1. The error you will see depends on how you are applying...

The Windows Installer team released Windows Installer 4.5 Beta 2 recently. While not a lot has visibly changed since the first beta for which I provided an overview , it's important to note that a new column was added to the CustomAction table since changes to column types are not supported in a transform...

The What's New section of the Windows Installer 4.5 CHM available in the downloads section of the Windows Installer 4.5 Beta Connect site has technical details of new functionality and changes as usual, but now that we can talk about Windows Installer 4.5 I wanted to provide an overview of the new functionality...

I've discussed a couple different reasons that Windows Installer 3.0-style patches - those with the MsiPatchMetadata table in the patch package itself - might not be uninstallable. I explained another reason in a discussion about the new patch build support in Windows Installer XML (WiX) v3 recently...

Patching with Windows Installer is the act of applying a pair of transforms in a patch to a Windows Installer product, then repairing that product. Any changes made in the transforms affect the aggregate view that Windows Installer reinstalls. This is displayed in the diagram below, where the bottom...

Before installing the release of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 , you must uninstall the Service Pack 1 Beta . If you do not uninstall the beta first, you will receive the following message localized appropriately for Windows, "The upgrade patch cannot be installed by the Windows Installer service...

There are a number of guidelines to prevent requiring source media for patch installation . These guidelines can also help prevent requiring source media during patch uninstall, but there are a number of caveats. Recall from Rebuilding the Installer Cache that the baseline cache contains files that...

My blog was pretty quiet for a while because of a problem we ran into regarding Windows Installer type 35 custom actions . These custom actions change the target location for a directory. Developer Division uses type 35 custom actions for vertical integration with other editions of our Visual Studio...