making setup update a excisting installation

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feurich

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I have a setup and it's working fine. The only little thing that I don't seem to get rid of is the fact that when i run the setup and there is already a version installed on my computer, the setup gives the meassage that that version first has to be removed before it can continue.
Does anyone know how to get rid of this little problem??

Cire
 
Usually Setup checks for the version already installed. If it is the same it tells you that it is installed. In your case Right Click Setup and Select Properties, In the Version field change the version to a higher number for example from 1.0.0 to 1.0.1 and build. Now your deployment is a newer version when you install it it will automatically replace the older one.

Hope this helps,
 
Where is version info??

Hi, i'm having the same problem and i was supprised when i found this thread.
Just a question. I suppose with "Right Click Setup and Select Properties" you mean the setup project contained in the solution.
So, when i right click setup project and the properties dialog appears i dont see anywhere any Version field.

Can you help??
 
Well yes I mean the Setup project but sorry for that, what I meant by properties is the properties window in Visual Studio .NET, so select the setup project and click on the Properties icon in visual studio .net.

Again Sorry for the confusion ....
 
This doesn't really work...

you can't install a program over itself successfully without changing the product guid. but when you do this, you're basically installing files over the old application.

This is a bit of a problem (especially when you're trying to setup a service like i am at the moment) if the program is locked for whatever reason.

There is a "unistall previous versions" option in the properties window as well, but i'm not sure if that works like it says on the tin.
 
This doesn't really work ...
Click to expand...
As long as it gives you an end result, I think you can say it works !!!
Actually when you change the version Visual studio .NET automatically asks you to change the guid, and you are right you are installing over the existing one, but whats the problem as long as the client has the new software, and doesnot have two softwares and doesnot have to uninstall to install the new one.

Thats all you need as a developer.
 
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that's only true as long as you keep the name the same for the application, same files, and same reg keys, which is highly unlikely in revision revamps.

It's also untidy to overwrite an existing program, when there are obselete files that may exist in the directory, legacy registry values and keys etc...

If the user did an unstall, it would only remove the newest edition of the program, leaving the old stuff behind. This is not sufficient.

Are there ways to manipulate the setup to uninstall the application, but keep system settings? It would be sort of an overwrite, but clean up of the old files too?

Another thing that seems to not work all that well are registry settings that are manually inputted into the reg editor. There's an option to have the program remove the reg entry when uninstalled, and this is, by default, set to false. (ie, when uninstalling, leave this stuff here). That would be great, because you could uninstall the previous version, and know that all the settings are still there for the new one to use. But when I've uninstalled my app, it removes the reg settings I said I wanted to remain.
 
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