Hello, I have a question regarding Product Codes? I have written my own Windows app which utilizes the FNC API. Presently, I only have one product that will be utilizing FNC. Thus, I have hard-coded the ProductCode of this product into my Windows app and this works fine, except I am not comfortable hard-coding the ProductCode.
Anyway, if we follow the proper rules for Windows Installers in terms of small updates, minor upgrades and major upgrades - it is conceivable at some point in time that I will have to perform a major upgrade of the existing product which dictates changing the ProductCode. Now, I have to change the hardcoded Product Code in my Windows App and provide an updated version of the app which will check for the new Product Code. This all seems very risky to me - I am open to suggestions on how to do this differently.
Really, the only alternate solution would be to use some type of configuration to control the product code you use. For example, you could set a registry entry named ProductCode to the property [ProductCode] during your installation.
The only major thing to consider is whether this may have an impact if you allow any type of co-existence.
Thanks for the reply Bryan. It would be a nice enhancement to FNC to be able to query the Notification Server for a list of available Product Codes rather than having to already have a ProductCode when you check for updates.
It's definitely something we can consider. The thing that would make it challenging right now is that there's no way outside of the product code for us to associate client-side data to you. That's something we could add, but I'm just letting you know that the infrastructure really isn't present right now.
As an alternative, would it be of any use if you could override the product registered with FNC during the installation using a property such as DWUSPRODUCT? In this way, you could register a single product code on our site and use something like versions to segregate your various versions. Would this be useful to you?
Thanks for the offer Bryan - we're self-hosted Premier Editon. I am working on a solution where I will utilize the FNC webservice to iterate through the available product codes.
