Our application uses MSDTC. Since the default Microsoft setup and whether MSDTC is even started automatically varies across OS’s, I have been setting the registry entries for our 32 Bit application during the install on 32 Bit systems (Basic MSI project). How can I do that on 64 Bit systems? As you would expect, my registry changes go into HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\MSDTC Instead of into HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSDTC Our application is still a 32 Bit application, but the registry entries I want to change are part of the 64 Bit registry stuff. I would really rather not have separate releases for 64 Bit machines. Any ideas are appreciated? Thanks, Ron
It seems that the separation between 32 & 64 bit systems is so tight that there is not a way to make changes to the 64 bit registry keys from a 32 bit application (which is not all bad). So I have a custom action that gets executed if "VersionNT64 AND NOT REMOVE". The CA simply displays a message box directing the user to finish the install and then follow instructions in a text file or run a bat file to set the registry entries manually.
I recently asked a very knowledgeable person who works for MSFT about that approach and his answer was:
Such "hybrid" packages would be relying on undocumented unsupported behavior of MSI. I haven't tried it and don't know what would work and what wouldn't.
I agree it's frustrating that MSI doesn't support such packages. We would have liked to have a single MSI package for the [SomeProductName] setup.
