My company has created an "Update Service" application that we would like to bundle with all of our existing software, so I have created a Merge Module that installs the the binaries and registers the service. I also had a few custom actions that I wanted in the module, and finally figured out today that a little direct editing of the ModuleInstallExecuteSequence can get Merge Module Custom Actions scheduled and ran. I now want to display a dialog whenever I am installing my merge module, and would prefer not to insert the dialog into every setup project that consumes it, but am at a loss on how to get it to appear. Has anyone done this before / know any good resources, as googling is really drawing a blank, and I can't seem to find the right help topics to figure this out.
Any help would be very much appreciated, thanks! Please let me know if this doesn't make sense as well, and I will try to rephrase.
TL/DR Version: How do I get a Dialog in a merge module to appear in an installer that consumes said module.
I see quite a few people have read this, but nobody has responded. Has nobody really ever tried having a dialog contained in Merge Module? It really does seem like it should be possible, and I'm pretty amazed I've found no record of it anywhere. I'm just trying to decide if I should abandon all hope or search for an answer.
As a general guideline, if you want your dialog to appear as part of the main dialog sequence (i.e. be part of the Next/Back buttons), you'll have to add it manually in every package that consumes the merge module. If instead you want to just have a dialog pop up at some point, you can sequence a custom action named the same as the dialog, and this can be done once in the merge module.
If you want the first, and will be using this consistently, it may be worth creating a template project that does all the grunt work of including it in your dialog sequence.
