Detecting Previous Installations With Other Installers

H4nd0 · Post by **H4nd0** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 4:27 am

Previous versions of our installers were built using other product (InstallShield, Inno, VISE).

I'm currently testing for the presence of various RegKeys in order to determine the previous version that may be installed.

Question: is there a better way? Can I just sample Add/Remove programs in some way and force an uninstall of the old version?

TIA!

MortSkil · Post by **MortSkil** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 6:21 am

Wise has a feature to scan MSI files for Product version GUIDs etc, which is quite handy to use for uninstalling previous products regardless if the install was created with another authoring tool than Wise.

Maybe InstallAware supports a similar feature?

MichaelNesmith · Post by **MichaelNesmith** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 11:32 am

Of course, there are many counterparts in InstallAware. For example, look at:

Read Registry
Check Registry
Run Program
Is MSI Setup Installed
(Un)Install MSI Setup

Also, each default setup project comes with a pre-built script block that uninstalls an older version of your InstallAware-based setup, using (Un)Install MSI Setup. So you can look at that block of code, and similary extend the idea to automatically uninstall your old versions built inside other IDEs.