Intel,Altiris Group

Hello,

We are using Wise for Windows Installer 5.21 Enterprise Edition (build 5.21.0.54), and it has been working well enough with our .NET 2003 (Framework 1.1) application well enough. However, are there any issues that would prevent us from using this version of Wise Installer after we upgrade our application to use .NET 2008 (Framework 3.5)?

Thanks,
LKB

None of the current Wise products offer official support for Visual Studio 2008 or its derivatives, so you may run into problems, but these may be surmountable using existing Windows Installer functionality.
Things like the DLLs used in the patching engine in the Wise editors are going to be massively out of date, but you can update these MS dlls from the latest windows installer SDK, which you can download from Microsoft.

The only real advice I can give you is to test, test and test again. If you have a specific issue, search the Altiris KB and/or post here.
Google also offers a powerful search capability that can identify known issues in creating MSI deployments for .NET packages, and offer workarounds, whatever tool you are using.

Check especially that assembly attributes of .NET dll files added to the installation are populated.

I remember when moving from .NET 1.1 to 2.0 (I think we used Wise version 4.x), the processorArchitecture attribute was not populated at all, leading to that I had to add it manually for every new file added in the installation. We upgraded at some point to 6.x and there were still some issues with .NET. Can't remember exactly.

Finally in the 7.x version, these issues are fixed, albeit for one. If both a Path variable and a Wildcard is used, new .NET dll files automatically get added to the hash table, which prevents assembly attributes from being populated, see this thread: http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/upgrades-not-replacing-files-added-project-wildcards and this KB: https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=34373&p=1