I have an unusual request from the QA team. They would like to see the UAC prompt before the user has to go through the UI portion of the setup. That way if the user does not have proper credentials then they don't waste time going through the UI sequence.
So far I am batting zero and personally I am reluctant to try and bypass the normal behavior, but in fairness to the system I must pursue all avenues.
I do have prerequisites to install - but they are not always installed - so I cannot depend on the option to pass UAC elevation from the prerequisites to the MSI. I do have the setup authored to require administrative rights, this is to address some issues with Windows Mobile installation options.
Is the setup.exe release setting "Required Execution Level" relevant to your needs? It's generally considered best to leave this as invoker, but setting it to Administrator will use the UAC right away. Couple it with MSIUSEREALADMINDETECTION and you can verify the setup was actually launched elevated.
If you can't rely on setup.exe being used, and don't want to just error out on the non-elevated case, I'm not aware of any way to do this purely from a .msi file. The summary information stream option only turns on and off the execute sequence UAC prompt; it can't move it.
