VS2015 Extension Manager not reporting update for MSI-intalled extension

Question

I've written a Visual Studio extension which installs using an MSI. The install puts a extension.vsixmanifest file in the right place, and the extension appears in the Extension Manager as expected:

The problem is, when I publish a new version on the Visual Studio Gallery, the Extension Manager does not report it. I add the new version by creating a new installer and editing the existing page. Each new installer has a new ProductCode, PackageCode and ProductVersion (I update the MSI setup project and the version number in the included extension.vsixmanifest), but the same UpgradeCode; an example 'upgrade' commit can be found on GitHub here.

The issue appears to be that when Visual Studio Extension Manager queries the extensions service for the latest version of my extension, it returns a blank string - the same result as if you query with an invalid extension identifier:

The two extensions successfully queried in the example are the NuGet client tools for VS2015 and the SQL Server Compact/SQLite Toolbox.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

OhhhhhhKAY. I've solved this, and it turned out to be a problem with the Visual Studio Gallery page editor.

When you add an extension, you're shown a VSIX ID box:

When you edit an extension (I'm using Chrome), that box has disappeared!

It's still in the DOM, but it's hidden from view. Because of this, I never entered my extension's VSIX ID into the form, it didn't have a value associated with it, and the extensions service therefore didn't return a version number for that ID. The Extension Manager uses the extensions service to find out the latest versions of installed extensions, so it wasn't reporting new versions of mine.

The VSIX ID box reappears if you deselect then reselect one of the extension's supported Visual Studio versions, so I've been able to assign the ID that way. The service now returns a version number, and the Extension Manager therefore shows available updates:

Answer 2

Probably you may need to raise ProductVersion as well and mind correct version conditions in Upgrade Table in installer project. If this will not help try investigating this issue installing with full verbose log (msiexec /i installer.msi /l*v logfile.log) this may give some clues. The worst case you may want to add an entry to RemoveFiles table to delete this file (during install before deploying your file) but that sounds nasty and i would prefer to avoid it.

Answer 3

I don't think this is a problem with your installer configuration, assuming your installer does, in fact, upgrade your product. If I understand your question correctly, this is an issue with Extension Manager.

Have you tried removing the trailing .0 from your new version string? There might be an poor/unexpected comparison result when comparing a 3-dot version to a 4-dot version.

You could also try doing a more extreme version number change (upping the major version) to see if Extension Manager picks that up.