I am trying to make a very simple installer project with WiX, and it will not run under non-administrator accounts.
Preamble:
-Visual Studio 2010
-WiX 3.7
-Program built on and for Windows 7, x64
I have a basic WiX installer project that is doing the most simple, standard installation process with nothing fancy:
-Install to Program Files
-Desktop and start menu shortcut
Problem:
This runs fine when I am logged in as an administrator, however on any non-administrator account (which means most people), it tells me I don't have enough privileges midway through the install and exits. From reading around, it appears that to install to the Program Files folder, the user must be an administrator. What I need is for the administrator login dialog to pop up and ask for credentials before proceeding, rather than just abruptly failing. I have read every relevant post here and on the WiX mailing archive and none of them give an answer that works.
I have tried every combination of these:
InstallScope="perMachine"
InstallerVersion="400", "300" and "200"
InstallPrivileges="elevated", and "limited"
<Property Id="ALLUSERS" Value="2" />
<Property Id="MSIUSEREALADMINDETECTION" Value="1" />
<Property Id="MSIFASTINSTALL" Value="1" />
and not a single one works. How should one go about making an installer that a non-administrator (again, most people) can actually run?
The closest answer I've seen is to instead use a boostrapper project that has a custom manifest. I've looked around and see no good examples of how to do that either.
Final notes:
-This must be run as administrator because I've packaged the Visual Studio 2010 redistributable as a merge module.
-Is there a way around this? Most people simply don't run as administrator. Naive users don't even know what it is. When did this get so complicated? Installing has always been such a breeze, and I was honestly very surprised with how difficult WiX has been.