Is it possible to force the installation of an "older" version ?
We used to use a 4 part version number of major.minor.milestone.changelist. Because our minor never changed, and windows installer ignores the 4th part, we had issues with upgrading our files. So as part of my build, I stripped out the minor, and made a 3 part version number. That work fine. However now, we've internally switched to 3 part numbers, and dropped the milestone field.
The downside is I now have released installs that are at version 1.10.xxxx, and I need to update them with my newest installer, which is 1.0.yyyy.
For various reasons uninstalling the old one first is not an option. Is there any way to force IS to allow the installation of the "older' 1.0.yyyy version ?
if it is an MSI type I think your only option will be to change the upgrade code of the new project, but create an Upgrade item that references the old upgrade code and then specifies the version number range that applies.
I am not sure if this will give you the behavior you are wanting or not, but at the least should allow you to automate the uninstall of the old application during the installation of the new one, depending on your upgrade settings.
Thanks for the reply. It is a Basic MSI project. Can the major upgrade be done without an uninstall ? The problem is that it's not really uninstallable. This is a specialized "application" that installs a bunch of drivers onto a virtual machine, to allow it to be imported into our desktop management system. It includes things like file system filter drivers that as far as we know can't be uninstalled. Whenever I try to remove it, the system hangs. Uninstall was never a requirement for our stuff, so we didn't bother putting that much effort into it.
under the settings for the major upgrade you can specify how to handle the upgrade. One of the options is to install the setup then remove unneeded files, not sure if that will work for you given what you are doing.
For future reference, if you are installing files that should never be removed you will probably want to set the "Permanent" flag on the files in question.
You may also want to make sure you are handling the install/uninstall correctly for drivers. As far as I know if they are configured correctly there should be nothing preventing you from uninstalling them.
