I have my product MSI, which customers can install individually.
There are other product suites in my company which will also be sharing and installing this product MSI.
How Do I do ref-counting in MSI ?
A:
There is nothing built-in to support this, unless your product makes more sense as a merge module and you distribute it that way instead. Assuming you stick with a full installer, it's not hard to conceptualize a model in which you pick a registry key under which to list consumers of this product. The last one to remove its key can also chain or otherwise remove the main product. However since nothing will enforce it, any single consumer missing this key could render it useless.
Traditionally one cops out and just lists the program in ARP so the user can control it.
Michael Urman
2009-10-15 14:30:51
if this is the case what refCounting is following link talking abouthttp://blogs.msdn.com/windowssdk/archive/2007/04/03/reference-counting-side-by-side-installation-and-the-windows-sdk.aspx
Avinash
2009-10-28 18:00:04
I'm not certain, as they call it a custom action. Normally I would think of it at the component level, preventing duplicate components from being installed multiple times over each other, and preventing removal until all MSIs hosting the components are uninstalled.
Michael Urman
2009-10-29 05:46:55