installation - WiX - Doing a major upgrade on a multi instance install

Question

So, I have a windows service which can have multiple instances installed on a single server. The installer needs to be able to upgrade a single instance. The installer uses Instance Transforms, but I am unsure how to get major upgrades working as I would like.

For a major upgrade to work, my understanding is that I should have the Product Code change, so instances are defined in this form:

<Instance ProductCode="*"
            UpgradeCode="{SOMEGUID}"
            ProductName="Instance 1"
            Id="Instance1"/>

The msi can be launched to install a new instance by:

msiexec.exe /i "installer.msi" TRANSFORMS=:Instance1 MSINEWINSTANCE=1

However, after much searching the only way I have found to run an upgrade on a specific instance is this format:

msiexec.exe /i "installer.msi" /n {PRODUCTCODE} REINSTALL=ALL REINSTALLMODE=vamus

The problem with this is if the product code is autogenerated for major upgrades, then I don't know what it is, so I can't pass in to the command arguments.

Is there a way to launch an upgrade using the Instance's UpgradeCode or InstanceID instead or ProductCode? Since both of those will stay static. Alternatively, can I launch the msi with no arguments, pick an existing instance (via checking registry) in the UI dialog, and set appropriate properties to force the msi into upgrade mode for that instance?

Answer 1

Pretty sure you need the product code for this since the upgrade code identifies a family of products, and not a single one.

Fire up PowerShell and run this command to get a list of installed products with product code:

Get-WmiObject -Class win32_product

Here is a different way to get the output in a tabular format (IdentifyingNumber is ProductCode):

Get-WmiObject Win32_Product | Format-Table IdentifyingNumber, Name, Version

You can also find the product code in the Property table of the compiled MSI using Orca (MSI SDK tool):