I am doing a compatibility check of MSI in the OPS environment before deploying to Production environment.
A part of this i am deploying first the latest MSI say "MSIv2 to OPS environment on top of MSIv1 and the MSIv2 automatically uninstall the MSIv1 and install MSIv2 without any issues.
Now when i am installing MSIv1 on top of MSIv2. MSIv1 is installed and it is showing in control pannel as installed.But when i see the directory path no .dll files are there in the bin folder.
i am logging the action of MSI in log file which tell ... Log: Disallowing installation of component: {AC7BC9EB-4F1D-4FEE-B0C2-478966229D8E} since the same component with higher versioned keyfile exists
The product code is "*" in wix. MSI get the version from one of the exe, which is deployed as part of msi. The exe is install the service when MSI is installed.exe is versionsed so MSI will have the same version. So when the lower version of MSI is installed the exe will also have the same version, hence exe compares with exe which is already there in the server and it decides not to install as the higher version already there.
So what I did is "RemoveExistingproduct" before="costing "
Which resolved the issue removing the product before the higher version.
Let me know if any other alternative is there and is it a right practice and what are the consequences.