Visual Studio 2010, Ensure Application EXE is always updated no matter what.

I wrote before about how to make sure that an .msi produced by a Visual Studio 2010 setup project correctly overwrites the application executable when installing an application update. Now the recommended techniques worked well for C# applications but I found that did not work reliably for VB apps for some random & annoying reason. No matter how many times I changed assembly and file versions etc. etc., the blasted thing would never update the installed .exe file!

So the only reliable way I found to make sure that the .exe was always updated was to use Orca to edit the .msi file and set the .exe’s version number to:

65535.65535.65535.65535

To set this version number right click on the .msi and choose ‘edit with Orca’, Click on ‘File’ in the ‘Tables’ section on the left of the screen, you should then see your .exe listed along with its version number. You can change the version number here and then save.

This ain’t pretty but its is the only way that I could get the installer to work reliably…