I'm using WIX to create a new installer for an existing product. The installer is very simple - just drops a few dll's into a specified folder on disk.
In the field, my users already have that folder with old dll's in them (since they installed the old MSI - created using a *.vdproj project in VS).
My problem is that after I install the WIX, I have both the old MSI and the new Wix MSI appear in Add/Remove. Expected (? since these 2 are two different kind of MSI's?). I need some kind of an upgrade mechanism - so I was wondering if I can call the old MSI uninstaller from within the WIX one. Or alternately somehow take care of the old Add/Remove entry (a registry hack perhaps?)
Assuming the old install and the new install are installed using the same context ( per-user -> per-user or per-machine -> per-machine ) you can use a MajorUpgrade rule to find the old version and get rid of it. You can do this by syncing up the UpgradeCode property and using a higher ProductVersion or you can do it by authoring a second Upgrade rule using the legacy UpgradeCode GUID.
If the old install was per-user and you want the new install to be per-machine you are out of luck. This isn't supported by MSI. Typically I only support per-machine installs and hardcode the ALLUSERS property and remove the CustomerInformation dialog from the installer UI experience. This is not the default experience for VDPROJ based installers.
