New WiX feature: Setting package installation scope

For flexibility at deployment time, MSI uses the value of the ALLUSERS property in determining the type of an installation—whether it’s per-machine or per-user. That lets a network administrator easily control whether the package’s shortcuts (for example) show up for all users or just one. There’s also the it-looks-good-at-first idea of ALLUSERS=2, which theoretically lets a package adapt to either an admin or non-admin user.

Problem is, in the era of UAC, a genuine per-user package wouldn’t require a prompt for elevation. Unfortunately, most “per-user” packages still need admin rights, because they still install to per-machine locations, like ProgramFilesFolder on the file system and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE in the registry.

To avoid lots of mysteriously failing packages, MSI 4.0 and later require packages to opt in as not requiring UAC elevation prompts. In WiX, that’s expressed by setting the Package/@InstallPrivileges attribute to limited. Confusingly, the default for ALLUSERS is null, which means to install the package per-user, so to get a per-machine package, you have to remember to instead set ALLUSERS to 1.

It’s easy enough to forget that, so I added the InstallScope attribute to the Package element to centralize the per-machine/per-user choice:

perMachine

Set this value to declare that the package is a per-machine installation and requires elevated privileges to install. Sets the ALLUSERS property to 1.

perUser

Set this value to declare that the package is a per-user installation and does not require elevated privileges to install. Sets the package’s InstallPrivileges attribute to “limited.”

This attribute doesn’t deprecate InstallPrivileges and you can use both (though it’s redundant to do so). If you specify perMachine, you must remove any Property element that sets ALLUSERS.