I am in the process of creating a system that will automate building a minor upgrade patch and eventually even a major upgrade patch.
My problem right now is in trying to find a tool that will do a MSI Diff prior to actually building the patch. The reason for this is that building a patch that affects several different releases can take a long time, and the only command line output that I can get from InstallShield software is AFTER I have built a setup and the patch validation has run and output to a file.
I have looked at MSIDIFF by http://dennisbareis.com/ppwizard.htm, however, I am not confident in the results. For instance it did not report a deleted component which would force a major upgrade. It does report deleted rows in the File and Registry table, however, none of these are conditions for a major upgrade.
Does anyone out there know of any other MSI diff tools that will report in a XML format all deleted rows. Or better yet a tool that will report if the difference between MSI package_0 and MSI package_n will require a major upgrade?
You need visual studio to compile the C# files, however, you have the option of XML or HTML output.
Now for the fun part, trying to evaluate if I need to update the ISM BEFORE creating my patch. I am wondering if it is possible to decompile the rules for validating patches and apply those to the output of MSIDiff?
