InstallAware

I am assuming you can release upgrades to an application by maintaining the same Product Code between versions, but changing the Revision Code. However the online help in IA 8 is contradictory. If you click on the Project Settings button, and then hit F1 from the Project Properties page that appears, the description for the Product Code field is

"The product code uniquely identifies your installation to Windows Installer. It must be unique in each different product, as well as different versions of the same product."

However if you select Project Properties directly from the nav panel and hit F1, the description is

"The Product Code must be unique for each different product, but may be the same for different versions of the same product."

Which is it? Should it be the same, or canit be different (provided the Revision Code is different). If you can issue new versions with the same product code as long as the Revision code is different, then what is the purpose of the "Upgrades Product with Product Code" field shown on the Project Properties page that comes up when clicking Project Settings (but not when you select Project Properties from the Nav panel).

Great find! The first text is in error. The second one is correct. Thanks!

Wow that was fast! Thanks for the reply. One other question - browsing the forum I see some posts where people report they have run into problems when releasing updates with the same product code, but a different name, e.g. AppX 2008 and AppX 2009 (or InstallAware 7 & InstallAware 8 ). If updates are released and the same product code is used, do you recomend using the same name (and not including for example the version # with the name)

Thanks

I don't know of any problems with that - InstallAware changes its name and it works every time?

I was referring to this thread

http://www.installaware.com/forums/view ... sc&start=0

and in particular to this comment,

jweksej wrote:But this is not IA bug!! IA assumes so the product with the same GUID has always the same name. I've broken this rule and now I'm looking for the workaround to keep all consistent. We can talk about new IA feature if it will be important for more customers. Up to now, the workaround is ok for me.

We're new to InstallAware & I was just wondering if it's a problem to recycle the Product Code but not the name, since up to now we have included a version number with the application name whenever we release an update.

Testing this, it seems that if we include the version in the name and install as an upgrade over top of a previous version, although the install succeeds (or so it seems), the previous version is still listed in the Windows add/remove programs list, along with the new version. If the old version is still listed, that causes me to wonder whether it is even properly getting uninstalled. Even if it is, it looks atrocious to have an uninstalled version still showing up.

I assume this is something that could be addressed with a higher version of IA (or by not including the version # in the name, something that is not acceptable to us), but allowing names of different versions of the same product to differ only by the version #, without breaking anything, seems like an extremely basic requirement for an installation tool (even fundamental), and to me shouldn't require any scripting (and part of the motivation for us in buying IA was that we have NO time or inclination for getting into the arcana or nitty-gritty of the windows installer, and isn't that InstallAware's business model in a nutshell, hiding what's become a ridiculous over-complexity of Windows installations, so people can concentrate on adding functionality to their applications, and not have to hire a staff of 5 just to handle the installations). Pardon the editorializing.

MichaelNesmith wrote:I don't know of any problems with that - InstallAware changes its name and it works every time?