Control Panel Uninstall

[Staggan]

If I do an overinstall of my application I end up with two copies of the unistall in the control panel, add / remove files section. But, I am only able to use one of these, and so I can only later uninstall one version....

How can I make it so that each uninstall relates to the correct version of my application, so that I can later uninstall both versions ?

Thanks

[Steve_K]

That is something I am interested, too. Currently, I have added an action to the post-install section that removes the uninstall stuff of previous versions ...

But that isn't the best solution since I sometimes forget to add the action to remove the uninstall registry stuff for all previous versions.

Maybe that is something for a future update of SF: let us specify whether uninstall links in the control panel should be created for every (minor) version of a product, or just for the major version. That would be the best solution IMHO.

Steve

[Adam]

In Uninstall -> Settings -> Control Panel the default for "Unique registry key" is %ProductName%%ProductVer% so if you update the version number of your install then it will create a new 'Unique' registry entry which leads to the double listing in "Add/Remove".

If you are installing one version over top of another then they cannot have unique uninstalls because all of these files will be over written, in that case I would either:

1) remove the %ProductVer% from the "Unique registry key" field. This is good because it will handle the case of an install on a fresh system OR installing over a currently installed set of files.

2) If you know that the current install will ALWAYS be installed over top of a current install you could just uncheck "List uninstall in Add/Remove...."

Adam Kapilik

[Steve_K]

:-) Thanks, Adam. That helps a lot ... I did not know what that unique uninstall key was composed of ...

[Sergio_S]

Don't forget that files installed by the first installer could not be completely uninstalled by the second uninstaller.
Just in case, in cases like that, I use to perform actions to delete flies and folders after uninstalling (use the action tabs). Be aware that this may delete the file uninstall.html too.

[Adam]

It is not good practice to install over top of an existing install. You could set up your installer to launch the uninstall first, or use a patching tool such as Visual Patch 2.0 to modify existing files on the users system.

Adam Kapilik