Question

I am working with the packaging of certain assemblies into an msi package. while doing this I have an requirement that I need to put the some assemblies into the local file system as well as in the GAC of the target machine. As we know the DuplicateFile Table won’t help in this case. I decided to put the assemblies twice in the CAB file with different Identifiers. Now to populate the Component Table I have different Components Identifier but I don’t have different Component GUIDs for the similar assemblies. My Question is if I keep the GUIDs (as basically the assemblies are same) same for the entries which have different Component Identifiers (in Component Table) is it going to effect the installation or uninstallation of the assemblies ? Also If I change the ComponentGUIDs (by generating GUIDs on the fly) for these assemblies will it effect the future update making to the assemblies (as the GUID for a particular assembly should be unique)?
Note: we are using our own application for creating MSI Packages.

Answer 1

If we use same GUID for registering two different components at the time of installation
everything will work fine functionality wise. but during uninstallation the component which comes later in the components msi table won’t get unregistered from the registry or the GAC. so we will have dll hell kind of problem.