Defining ProductCode for multi-language MSI installer?

[bobhairgrove]

Question

I am using Wix Toolset 6.0.2 with the HeatWave extension in Visual Studio.

There is a technique described here for generating a single MSI file with multiple language UI using embedded transforms. If making a burn bundle instead of an MSI installer, the language aspect is solved differently. However, I can get by with just an MSI installer, but would like to have the automatic language-switching as described in this article.

If I generate English, German and French versions of my MSI from the same code base using the localization facility with *.wxl files, then I can generate transforms using wix msi transform via the following commands:
Assuming the output from Visual Studio build is stored in <project folder>\bin\x64\Release\en-US and different subfolders for each language, and my MSI is called MyInstaller-<LANG>.msi, I have the following commands which generate MST transforms in the MST subfolder. These are run from the bin\x64\Release subfolder on the command line:

wix msi transform .\en-US\MyInstaller-EN.msi .\de-DE\MyInstaller-DE.msi -out .\MST\de.mst -t language
wix msi transform .\en-US\MyInstaller-EN.msi .\fr-FR\MyInstaller-FR.msi -out .\MST\fr.mst -t language

Using Orca, I can apply each transform to the English MSI and see the highlighting of what gets changed. Although the UpgradeCode is the same (which I define in the Wix authoring), the ProductCode gets clobbered when I apply a transform (i.e. each MSI file is generated with its own ProductCode, which overwrites the one in the English-language MSI). All other vital parts such as PackageCode, component GUIDs, etc. seem to stay the same.

Now I know that I should keep the UpgradeCode the same until the end of time, and the current wisdom says to let Wix generate the ProductCode. However, it seems that in order to avoid messing with it later on, in this particular scenario the ProductCode should be defined explicitly so that each localized MSI file has the same ProductCode as well as the same UpgradeCode.

Is there any downside to this except for the fact that each new version needs to have a new ProductCode? It seems like it wouldn't be too hard to maintain since I have the product version isolated in its own *.wxi included file, and I could put a variable defining the ProductCode in that file.

Open Source Maintenance Fee

• I (or an organization I'm a member of) pay the Open Source Maintenance Fee by sponsoring the wixtoolset project because I support the maintainers.