I'm trying to use "Patch Design" instead of QuickPatch project to deliver a small update to an existing installation. The requirement is that the patch setup will be small and contains only those files which have changed. (With the QuickPatch project it is easy as you manually add files which must be part of the patch setup. So you are sure that no other files are part of the deliverable.   So I took the MSI for the product to be patched as "previous". I created a new build using the original project where only a few files are changed. This is the "latest".   As I can not see which files will be taken to be part of the patch installer I build it completely. During build it seems almost all files from the latest build are taken. But not all. In my case here, instead of a few files to be added I see about 800 files being compressed and put in the patch build. I checked a few files to see why they are added. For all files there is no difference between the previous and latest build. The file size, date, location etc etc are 100% identical. But still they are part of the patch. Which results in a setup of 500Mb which would be only 100Kb when only the changed files were taken. Is there an explanation? I would expect that InstallShield does a bit-wise check to determine if the file has been changed. And strangely some files are indeed not added. But they are of the same type and are indeed identical. But somehow those are correctly identified as changed where other files in the same situation are taken into the patch. Is there a setting to change the behavior how files are checked? Can I change the project so that a patch will actually produce the setup I need? Could it be related to the fact that some components are dynamically linked? In that case, how do I prevent they are added to the patch?   ... View more

Hi, I am using QuickPatch project (InstallShield 2020 R3 SP1 premier edition) to update a specific component (dll) from an old to newer version on a target machine.   The dll is a 3rdParty .NET COM Interop component. The application which is patched uses this component as COM.   The original MSI project has this dll and it is a KeyFile and in the .NET settings the option .Net COM Interop = Yes   In the QuickPatch project I added to the file list a newer version of this dll. But when installing the patch on a system, the dll is indeed replaced but the application gets an error when trying to use it. The object is not found. I see that the registry still has the old COM interface. So it did not register the new component.   After inspecting the build log of the QuickPatch project I see no errors. I see nothing special in the installation log. So I changed the QuickPatch project and checked the option "Extract COM information". Then I see this in the build log: Extracting COM data from 1 component(s) ISDEV : warning -4354: The build was unable to extract COM information from the file D:\GITMANUAL\RISGITMANUAL\Packages\RISGdPicture\GdPicture\GdPicture.NET.14.dll in component GdPicture. Please ensure that the file is self-registering and verify that the self-registration process does not fail.   What is wrong here? I can not get this dll patched and registered on the target machine. Is this a bug in InstallShield? Did I set the properties wrong? Or are .NET COM Interop dll's not supported in QuickPatches?   Any help is welcome. At this point I'm stuck and have to idea where to find the issue and a solution. ... View more

We deliver our product using a InstallShield setup.exe It is a fairly complicated project which has a GUI to install components, some custom scripting and registrations of COM etc etc. The setup is huge, about 1.3 Gb and contains lots of files. We also deliver hotfixes to customers. At this point we do this manually. So we fix defects in house and the affected files are put into a ZIP with copy instructions and sometimes extra steps to perform at customer site. Mostly a hotfix only contains a couple of files which have to be copied to the installation folder of the product and replace the existing ones. Sometimes we need to unregister an old COM component, copy a new version of it and then register. As this is manual work for developers here and manual work for the admins at customer sites, we would like to use InstallShield to deliver the hotfixes as a setup.exe. So make it easier for customers to apply a hotfix just by starting a setup.exe.   Goal is that the developer can easily put fixed files in the project, specify what to do with them (mostly just copy/overwrite existing files and create a setup which is small (only contains the files to be overwritten). We do not want to see in installed programs that a patch has been installed. So the original program (major version) is visible in installed products but the patch will not. So there is no need to have an uninstall option for the patch. You can install the major product version (full setup) and on top of that a patch setup and be able to uninstall the major product when needed. You could rerun the same patch setup multiple times which just does what it is instructed to, copy files. A new hotfix (on top of the previous one) will just copy the set of files without bothering about if a previous hotfix was installed or not. Out hotfixes are cumulative, so hotfix 2 contains hotfix1.   I'm lost in all the options in InstallShield to make a good choice how to do this. I was thinking about a simple project which just copies the files to installation folder and not registering any product changes. So what we normally do manually we let it do by InstallShield.   What are my possibilities? I would be grateful if someone has tips how to start. Thanks. ... View more