Uninstall integration - Setup Factory & Visual Patch

[GregSohl]

I found some discussion of this but it was 8 years old. I'm hoping the answers are better now.

1. We do our initial installations with Setup Factory, and include an uninstall.
2. We are now working on doing our updates with Visual Patch.

The sales information recommends using the two together. So... how do we use the two together, keeping uninstall capable after performing an update with Visual Patch? I'm looking for details please and hopefully answers that don't require weeks of each VP user coding and testing what should be pretty much out of the box solutions.

Greg

[Ulrich]

Sadly, you did not provide any kind of detail, explaining why your application would not be uninstalled with the original uninstaller deployed by the setup, or what older post you were referring to. As long as you are not deploying any new files, but are only changing the contents of already existing files on the user's system, the original uninstaller would remove everything, even if the file was updated. If you deploy new files, Visual Patch provides the features to add these new files or folders to the uninstaller previous XML file, so these new files won't be left behind when the application is removed. Using such actions is easy, but it is not done automatically by the project wizard.

Another way to handle this would be having cleanup actions in your uninstaller, which would delete any files left behind in the application and/or program data folder. If you already know that future releases may have new files which aren't present in the current setup, you could add code to verify if there are any remaining files in the folders you create, and delete them when found, as part of the original uninstaller script.

Ulrich