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I am in the process of creating an MSI for our product. I would like the product to be able to install side-by-side. So that I can install 1.0.0 first and later can add 1.0.1 so that the two versions are both installed.
I am using WiX to create the msi and would like to know how this can and should be done in Wix? For example
Greetings, Martijn
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The Fragment element is the building block of creating an installer database in WiX. Once defined, the Fragment becomes an immutable, atomic unit which can either be completely included or excluded from a product.
Adding a WiX setup project In Visual Studio, open your solution, and add a WiX project to it: go to the Visual Studio main menu and click File -> Add -> New Project to open the Add New Project dialog. Choose the Setup Project item in the Windows Installer XML node, specify the project name and click OK.
Windows Installer XML Toolset (WiX, pronounced "wicks"), is a free software toolset that builds Windows Installer packages from XML. It consists of a command-line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to build MSI and MSM packages.
You should be able to get away with just changing the top-level productcode and UpgradeCode GUIDs to make your two products completely unrelated, and use the Productversion to identify the version. You can share component guids between products (that's how merge modules work) so that the guts of your installer (component definitions) needn't be tweaked and can still be shared.
You major challenge will be ensuring that the two decoupled products don't interfere with one another, for example by having the same default installation folder, start menu entries and the same Add/Remove programs entry. You might achieve this by including the product version number in the ProductName Property, which can look a bit techy in your install UI, but it isn't unheard of.
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