Is there any way to create a patch for an ASP.Net web application installer?

Question

Is it possible to create patch installers for web deployment installers generated in VS2005?

I have a situation in which it is undesirable to perform a complete uninstall/reinstall of a web site, but in which periodic bug fixes and minor upgrades are made.

I've tried following the instructions in various online posts about using msimsp.exe to generate a patch file, but most/all of them rely on some usage of msiexec.exe to create an administrative install for comparison, since msimsp.exe can't cope with compressed content (e.g. CAB files). Web installations don't really have an administrative install, however, and ultimately the patch creation fails.

Of course, I can create an installer containing just the changed files by hand, but that's prone to error, and having an automated process is more desirable.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

The WIX (Windows Installer XML) documentation has a section on Patch Building using a Patch Creation Properties (PCP) authoring file for creating a delta patch file.

Answer 2

Thanks for the suggestion but again, this is a web installer. All of the documentation I've found for generating patch files with PCP and MSIMSP.EXE involves performing an administrative installation of the installers. There isn't really an administrative install for a web installer (at least not the kind generated in VS2005), so the MSIMSP.EXE patch generation process kind of short-circuits there.

I'm looking into InstallShield to see if any finer control is available there...

Answer 3

Sorry for not helping, I can however tell you how we use WIX to create the installation for our web-site.

We have created a WIX template (Plan Old XML), and we then traverse the build output folder using an utility we wrote our-selves to get the list of folders and files that need to go into the resulting WIX file. This process is rolled into the build (MSBuild) for the web-site, so the MSI creation is automatic.

Answer 4

We deploy using Subversion.

http://blog.lavablast.com/post/2008/02/I2c-for-one2c-welcome-our-new-revision-control-overlords!.aspx