VS or WIX MSI installer - show serial number from first install

Question

I'd like to show the serial number in the CustomerInfo form (which was captured from the first install and installed in the registry) within the second, third, etc installs when the upgrade is simply a minor version change (or patch). Is this something that can be done within VS deployment project and/or WIX via a custom action (I have a C++ method to fetch the SerialNumber from the registry), MSI config (thru editing a table(s) via say Orca), or otherwise
Regards
Travis

Answer 1

Personally I always do PerMachine installs and don't bother to show the customer information dialog. If an application wants to have licensing it's best to do it in the application on first run.

If you really want to do it in the MSI, you've got a lot of work ahead of you. MSI doesn't persist properties across transactions so you'll have to do it yourself. See:

The WiX toolset's "Remember Property" pattern

I have an open source project called IsWiX. It includes a Visual Studio project template that creates an installer project framework. Part of that framework shows how to insert a custom dialog and then authors a component to handle the remember property for the control on that dialog. You can find the source here.

Answer 2

I'll skip the WiX part that Chris covered.

To do this in a VS project you're supposed to use the Customer Information dialog, added from the list of extra canned dialogs, and use the SerialNumberTemplate stuff. That sets the ProductID property which is the way you're supposed to do serial numbers. So then you could create a registry item in the Visual Studio IDE that has the value [ProductID] to save it somewhere personal. The "official" way to get hold of it for an installed product is MsiGetProductInfo() or equivalent passing the ProductCode and asking for "ProductID" as documented here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa370130(v=vs.85).aspx

To summarize, if the package uses the official PIDKEY /ProductID mechanism (like VS and maybe WiX) you don't need to save it yourself and you can get it via MsiGetProductInfo() or a scipt/managed code equivalent.

If you want to show that previous SerialNumber in a VS setup in the standard customer information form on an upgrade, I don't believe you can do that. There's no mechanism for getting into those forms. If you save the SerialNumber privately, you could try a registry search for your saved serialnumber and store it in the PIDKEY property to see if it shows up there, that might work because the PIDKEY property is the source for that value.