AppSearch & LaunchConditions

  • Article

Recently I read the book of "The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer" to understand how Windows Installer works. Seemly it is quite easy to create a launch condition based on a registry search in Orca. We just need to edit three tables:

  • RegLocator
  • AppSearch
  • LaunchCondition

It works perfectly on the MSI which is created in Visual Studio .NET, but unfortunately it does not work on some MSIs (e.g. the sample template MSI in Windows SDK package). After digging it further, I found there are another two "important" steps:

  1. AppSearch should occur LaunchConditions in both "InstallExecuteSequence" and "InstallUISequence" table.
  2. Signature table has to exist (even if it is an empty table).  

Good luck!