I was wondering if there was a way to tweak either the .msi or the registry to set the version displayed in Add/Remove Programs to reflect the actual applications .exe version. Since Windows Installer only recognizes/used #.#.# and executables and libraries are versioned #.#.#.#, they are out of wack a bit.
I would like add remove programs to reflect 1.2.0.44 instead of our install product version crunch to 1.2.44.
Then my question would be, would any change to this potentially harm the uninstall or upgrade processes due to a displayed version change.
I do see that in the registry that if I change the DisplayVersion value of HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Unintstall\{Product GUID} key, I see it reflected in ARP.
It would be nice, if a change here doesn't cause problems, I could set this in the .msi instead of setting in the registry at the end of the install.
You should be able to set the product version to 1.2.0.44 in your project and have it show up as that version in ARP. However, any version comparisons Windows Installer performs (such as on major upgrades), the version it will compare to would be 1.2.0.
You could possibly work around this by using a custom action to change the DisplayVersion registry value after the RegisterProduct action. This shouldn't affect anything other than the version value displayed in ARP. One thing to note is that Windows Installer maintains its own private copy of most of the ARP information that can be queried with APIs such as MsiGetProductInfo, which could then provide a different version string than what ARP indicates.
Does this work? I've tried this on a test PC (running Windows XP SP2) and manually changed the registry key for the application name for my application and Add-Remove Programs still displays the the original name. Since it was the only application installed on this fresh machine, it was very easy to find it in the registry.
I have this problem too in that I want to append the version number to the application name where the version number is passed as a command line arg. when building the release. Is there another approach or do I have the wrong registry key?
