We have a C++/CLI Windows Forms application that we traditionally have built an MSI for using InstallShield. The MSI allows us to install the application in full using manual methods of double clicking and using the MSI. This has worked well for us as it allows for multiple different MSIs to be available at any one time and installed on different machines accordingly.

What we have tried/done in the past: We had been moving the project to "Release" mode at the top, rebuilding the project Solution in its entirety, and then right clicking on the Setup1 project (which was simply one of the projects under our solution) and selecting Rebuild on that to create our MSI. The MSI would be created and would be dropped in the Setup1 folder under the project's debug folder stuff. We were then able to simply copy/paste this MSI where needed. A bit manual of a process, but very simple and worked well for our purposes.

The InstallShield Setup1 project usually had no issues with doing this, only when adding new namespaces completely. If there were any issues with files/namespaces being available during this process, we usually were able to modify and use the Setup1.isl file by opening it up in a text editor and adding the files/namespaces that were missing from the file (this only occurred when adding new projects completely, as they had new namespaces), as well as occasionally playing around with the few menus available in the Setup1 project to get new images added etc. None of this stuff has changed, though.

Hopefully this is all sounding familiar to someone out there. Basically, we are trying to build an MSI using InstallShield.

Upon moving to Visual Studio 2022, we would still like to be able to use Revenera InstallShield, but are running into incompatibility issues when attempting to do the same as we had done before.

I am wondering if there are any known solutions to this issue, if there is any chance that InstallShield could be made compatible with VS2022, or if we need a different version of InstallShield and/or need to backtrack to Visual Studio 2015 when attempting to build an MSI for this project. The project is fairly old and uses C++/CLI (a mixture of C++ and C#) for the actual code with MFC components, has custom bitmaps for some of the images, etc. It is a fairly old build process that we would like to not have to change if possible.

What we have tried so far to resolve: I have tried updating Visual Studio 2022, and making sure it has all the appropriate C++/CLI and MFC packages that would be needed to build our type of project. We have tried going down the same simple build process as we had done previously. We have had little to no issues in the past building this type of project. Not sure if a recent VS2022 update has caused this to happen, or an update to the MFC or C++/CLI packages (not expecting anyone to know this info, but perhaps we could at least narrow down to this being the case).

Sidenote question: If there is a new version of InstallShield that would resolve our issues, how we would go about obtaining that?

Thank you in advance for reading and have a nice day.