Windows Installer: A wrong information is displayed in the Add/Remove programs applet

Some time ago I was asked by the developer: what can be a cause when we see an old information in the Control Panel applet for our application? It can be a wrong description, old build version and etc. Well, it depends...

First, I took a look at the Add/Remove Programs tool displays installed programs incorrectly article. The list of OS is pretty old, so I don't think that you find the real cause there.

Then I started looking at the source code. Due to the fact that Windows Installer projects were removed from the list of Visual Studio projects, we use WiX toolset for creating installers to deploy the software on other machines. Didn't find anything strange in the XML markup also, so decided to look at the .MSI file itself. The Orca.exe utility is a great help in such cases. See How to use the Orca database editor to edit Windows Installer files for more information. But there I didn't find any possible cause also. All properties were set according to the source files.

Well, what can be a reason then?


I started learning the way how the Control Panel applet (Add/Remove Programs) gathers the required information about installed applications. Typically the picture looks like the one shown below:


 

The picture describes an algorithm how the required information is gathered by the OS to list the installed application from a high perspective. I omitted low-level details.





On a x64 based systems the OS looks at the first registry hive and if the application with a specified ID is found, the information for that ID is ignored then when searching in another hive (Wow6432Node). Even if the application is listed there, the information is ignored. The priority is higher for the first hive.

After I removed old entries from both hives and installed the application anew I don't see the issue any longer - the version numbers are displayed correctly.

When you create an installer using the WiX toolset and play with a bitness of the installer don't forget to delete old registry keys that Windows Installer leaves after uninstalling the software. It will save you a great amount of time!

Popular

A bad sample from the VSTO team (Microsoft)

Image
Microsoft Office add-in developers are aware of the setting for displaying ribbon UI errors. So, I keep it set everywhere to prevent releasing the code that may lead to UI errors on end users machines. Here is where you can find the option for enabling that: See  How to: Show Add-in User Interface Errors  for more information. And recently after latest updates for Microsoft Office, I suddenly started getting annoying error message boxes in Excel with UI errors. I have got Excel with the following build numbers installed on my machine: Microsoft Excel 2016 - 16.0.9330.2073 - 32-bit   Here is how it looks like in Excel, the error message bombs users twice when they try to open the File menu (the File backstage tab) and go back, or just open another workbook - a lot of cases: As you see on the screenshot, the caption says that an error message is caused by the VSTO design-time adapter for Excel. Then I checked the list of COM add-ins in Excel and f...
Continue reading »

What does 'Embargo' mean for IT professionals? - Part I

Image
     I am, like any other Windows based developer, extensively use services and software provided by the U.S. companies. But recently I started to see a strange message stating that the country where I live (Belarus now) is sanctioned by the United States and my IP addresses are blocked. So, we can't use their services any longer. Most probably, and I suspect that such decision was made based on the Russia-Ukraine war. Because earlier this year I could open any page on the web site without any issue. But how we, developers, are related to the war or even politician games?  For example, I see the following text on the Pluralsight.com web site: Because your IP address or billing address is associated with a country that is sanctioned by the United States, by U.S. law we are required to block your access to Pluralsight.com. If you believe you are receiving  this message in error, please contact ...@pluralsight.com The exact picture is shown on ...
Continue reading »

Is it possible to move the Windows Apps installation folder to another drive?

Image
Some time ago I moved my system drive to the SSD rails. But getting updates from Microsoft that can take more than 5 Gb at a time I had to keep an eye how much free space is available. Then I started to think what can be removed or moved to another drives. I noticed that a lot of Windows Store Apps are installed and consume a quite big amount of expensive memory. For example, only one of the Store applications takes more than 1 Gb of space on the drive. So, I decided to change the picture dramatically and change the location of Windows Apps. In general, there are two main ways for getting the job done. 1. Change the value of the PackageRoot key in the windows registry.  You can find it in the following hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Appx Don't forget to restart the machine to apply the changes. That's it. 2. Move the original folder to a new drive and create a symbolic link instead. As a rule the Windows Apps installation f...
Continue reading »