I have a setup project in Visual Studio. As part of the regular installation, it creates/updates some keys and values in the Windows Registry. How can I make the updates reversible?
you may say "they are reversible", but I don't think so. Here's how I think it works: USe the VS designer to specify which Registry Keys and Values you want. Those keys and values are written during install, and deleted during uninstall. Simple. What's not reversible?
The problem comes in when there's an existing value in one of the keys that is written during install. Suppose it has a value of 1. Then with the new install it gets a value of 100. After uninstall, it has no value at all - the value is gone.
I tried to work around this with "custom actions".
During install, if the user confirms, msiexec writes the values into the the registry. Whatever was in the registry key before, is gone. (Let's call this "Update A")
To preserve that value, on install, there's a custom action that reads and preserves the "before" setting. It runs before "Update A". So far, so good.
On uninstall, the normal course of action, is to remove the regular registry keys and values that were added during install. This works just fine. Call this "Update B".
To restore the original registry values, I have another "custom action". This one runs on uninstall. It successfully restores the original values into the Registry. The registry looks just as it was before the original install. I verified that this works using ProcMon (A tool that lets me monitor registry updates, among other things). Call this "Update C".
There's only one problem. On uninstall, Update B is happening after Update C. This means, after the custom action restores the original registry setting, msi wipes out the restored Value, as it does with all the other registry updates.
The result is the registry has empty Values instead of the restored ones.
Any help? How can I re-order the updates? Do I need Orca for this? I really don't want to install and learn another tool to make this happen. I also want it to be automatic. Definitely don't want to have to visually click through an MSI editor to make this happen.
Can I do this with a Javascript post-build event that uses the WindowsInstaller.Installer class? Aaron Stebner published a script that adds a "Launch application after install?" dialog to an MSI produced by Visual Studio. Windows Installer supports a "launch app" capability but it is not exposed in the designers for VS2008/2005. A quick biolerplate script, run as a post-build step in VS, added in the Launch dialog.
Is something similar possible with the ordering of custom actions?