Yes, can't agree enough. Every installer out of DevDiv (Silverlight, .NET, 
Visual Studio, Expression, etc) is now based on Wix - recommend it highly.

Mitch - by the way, which WinPhone did you get?

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Tony McGee
Sent: Friday, December 03, 2010 11:16 PM
To: ozDotNet
Subject: Re: Visual Studio installer problem

+1 recommendation for the WiX toolset.
Depending on how complex your requirements are you may not even need a custom 
action just to write configuration to an XML file. We've had success collecting 
some MSI variables at install time and then using an xpath expression to save 
the values to app.config.


On 4/12/2010 10:48 AM, Mitch Denny wrote:
Time to switch to WiX I'm afraid. You can typically migrate your Installer 
derived classes to WiX managed custom actions (DTF).

Sent from my Windows Phone
________________________________
From: Greg Keogh
Sent: Saturday, 4 December 2010 8:48 AM
To: 'ozDotNet'
Subject: Visual Studio installer problem
For years now I've been making MSI files with the Visual Studio Setup projects. 
My setups are all out of the box, the only fancy bit is that I sometimes use a 
Custom Action DLL to collect parameters from added Dialogs and write the values 
to an XML file for the installed app to use. I've been using the CA for years 
as well.

Yesterday one of my typical Setup projects became "diseased" and the first time 
I ran the installed WinForms app it would run a repair and overwrite my XML 
file of collected parameters. This auto-repair runs the first time I run the 
installed app. Once this "first-run-repair disease" sets in, it gets stuck in 
the project forever. Backing out changes will make no difference. The only way 
to cure the "disease" is to delete the whole project and make another one.

I spent 4 hours trying to overcome the problem yesterday. This morning I've 
spent another 2 hours creating a fresh Setup project and bit-by-bit I carefully 
added changes to the project. When I added custom BMP images to the setup 
dialogs the "disease" appeared and is now permanent again. I find it hard to 
believe that adding the images would cause the disease. So I'm going to delete 
it all and start over again to try and find a pattern.

6 hours of unpaid work and still counting and people are waiting for my MSI ... 
Anyone seem this problem before?

Greg

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