If both the new installer and the old product being removed are using Windows Installer (Basic MSI), you might also look into creating a major upgrade in the new installer to remove the old one, specifying the old product's Product Code GUID as the product to be "upgraded". ... View more

The InstallShield help topic "Calling Functions in Windows Installer DLL Files" has a short walkthrough that might be useful. It has an example of the function signature that a DLL you call directly from a custom action wants. ... View more

Also, is this an InstallScript project or a Windows Installer project? If it's MSI, you might try creating a DLL you can call directly as a custom action, rather than doing it in two steps. ... View more

If you have a copy of Dependency Walker or the dumpbin tool that ships with Visual Studio, is the "Hello" function exported? For example, if you run dumpbin /exports HelloWorld.dll, does Hello show up? If not, you might try adding a .def file to your VS project: add a text file called HelloWorld.def, with contents: LIBRARY "HelloWorld" EXPORTS Hello ... View more

You might also be missing a Fetch or two. For an example, please see this ancient newsletter tip (PDF): http://resources.flexerasoftware.com/web/pdf/archive/msiaccess.pdf. (Beware obviously bad formatting and line breaks in the example there, such as "WH ERE". The similar InstallShield help topic "Windows Installer API Functions Example" has the queries and function sequence correct.) ... View more

(Duplicate post. Follow-up of sorts [thread=207467]here[/thread].) ... View more

In last panel of the Release Wizard, when you're creating the new build, you'll want to browse for the previous package in the Previous Windows Installer package field. This is meant to help InstallShield match up those automatically generated component GUIDs when you add a bunch of files in subdirectories for the sake of creating patches. ... View more

I don't think there's anything built in. For Basic MSI, the closest thing I'm aware of is using a modal dialog. The MSI help topic 'Authoring a Conditional "Please Wait . . ." Message Box' has an example, but in any case your custom action would need to do the work of deciding when to close the dialog box. ... View more

Assuming you have an MSI from a repackaged installer or have created a new one in the InstallShield editor, you can remove a registry key on installation by adding a record to the RemoveRegistry table. The help has more details about what goes in a RemoveRegistry record. ... View more

Please see the section "Locating the License File" in the Programming Reference for License File-Based Licensing. Calling lc_set_attr with LM_A_LICENSE_DEFAULT is one way, and there are others involving external means such as using environment variables. ... View more

[thread=193982]This thread[/thread] might help. The Windows functions that LaunchAppAndWait uses don't support output redirection with > (the command processor does that), so you might need to launch a batch file or launch cmd.exe directly, assuming the command works without the > part. ... View more

Right, a DIM is closer to a merge module, with just components. I think the original idea was that a product developer who wasn't the setup developer would create a DIM to define the data that needs to be installed, and then the install developer can figure out the UI, how the DIM's contents fit into the feature tree, and so on. ... View more

Just to be clear, where is your custom action that calls MsiGetProperty to read SETUPEXEDIR? That is, where is the action scheduled? What type of custom action is it? ... View more

Maybe I'm behind the times, but I believe DIMs contain only component information and data and not feature information, which is why (for example) you add a DIM to a feature but not to the product overall. ... View more

It depends when you're trying to get this information: if you're getting it from the running first-time installation, you might call MsiGetProperty to get the "OriginalDatabase" property (described in the MSI help file) and then parse it to get the file name. If you do need to call the DLL function later, maybe check (using Dependency Walker or depends.exe) if the function is split into ANSI (MsiSourceListGetInfoA) and Unicode (-GetInfoW) varieties, where there might not be an undecorated (without -A or -W) version. ... View more