Lost in the Visual Studio maze?

Question

Where can I find the ARPCOMMENTS through the Visual Studio GUI in a .NET solution with a setup project?

The value of ARPCOMMENTS shows up when "Click here for support information." is clicked in Control Panel "Add or Remove Programs". I have changed it once, but I forgot where it is.

Answer 1

From:

Setup project - Deployment project properties - using [ProductVersion] inside Description property

The Description property of the setup project stands for the MSI standard property ARPCOMMENTS. If we set the value of the Description property of a setup project, an item will be added to the Properties table in the resulted MSI package to set the value of the ARPCOMMENTS property.

The remarks part of the MSDN document about Property table mentions:

"You cannot use the Property table to set a property to the value of another property. The installer does nothing to the text string entered in the Value column before setting the property in the Property column."

"This is necessary to prevent creating circular references in the Property table. Instead, you can set one property to another by using a Custom Action Type 51."

So the solution of your problem is to add a type 51 custom action to the MSI package. Unfortunately, Visual Studio doesn't support adding a type 51 custom action in the setup project. I suggest that you do this using Orca.

The following are the steps to add a type 51 custom action to an MSI package: 1. Build your setup project in Visual Studio. 2. Open the resulted MSI package with Orca. 3. Locate the CustomAction table in the left list and add a new row in this table as follows: Action Type Source
Target Set_ARPCOMMENTS 51 ARPCOMMENTS ... version [ProductVersion] ... 4. Locate the InstallExecuteSequence table and add a new row to call the above custom action. You can sequence the call to the custom action after the DIRCA_TARGETDIR action. For example: Action Condition Sequence Set_ARPCOMMENTS NOT Installed 760 5. Save the changes. 6. Install the modified MSI package on the target machine.

Hope this helps. If you have any question, please feel free to let me know.

Sincerely, Linda Liu

Answer 2

What is confusing is that the immediately apparent "Properties" from the context menu for a setup project will open a window with configuration options.

Whereas selecting the setup project and pressing F4 (or menu command View/Properties window) will open the desired window where property Description can be edited:

(ARPCOMMENTS is the same as property Description - it is stored in the project file for the setup project, MascotParserSetup.vdproj in my case.)