There have been relatively few systemic DTF problems over the years. One was a race condition that caused a CA to report an error for no good reason and another was the hosting engine didn't set the current directory so if another evil custom action previously changed the custom action sandbox working directory the LoadLibrary call would fail and the CA wouldn't start. I am heavily invested in DTF so whenever there is a rumor of a systemic problem I'm very concerned.
Can you sanitize this into a minimalistic installer that will reproduce your problem? If so, can you send it to me to build and test? Thanks, Chris ________________________________________ From: Adam Kadzban <mightyshorta...@gmail.com> Sent: Monday, February 03, 2014 10:45 PM To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset. Subject: [WiX-users] Restrictions on managed CAs for DTF Hey guys, I'm running into some really strange behavior with managed Custom Actions (C#) and DTF's compilation (?) of them. I've made a few WIX installers before, all with C# Custom Actions, and never run into this before, so I think I've covered all the basics and it's got me really scratching my head. I've got a WIX (3.8) installer project and a C# (.NET 4.5) Custom Action project. I didn't do anything fancy, just added the projects in Visual Studio (2012). I did a bunch of dialog/UI stuff in WIX before adding some custom actions to do input validation, and the dialog scheduling and everything seemed fine. Now, I'm seeing off and on invalid DLL errors when the installer tries to load the Custom Action DLL. The error popup message says "There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A DLL required for this install to complete could not be run. Contact your support personnel or package vendor." Checking the log, it has the same message, but with error number 1723 (I ran msiexec with "/l*v"). The error comes up when the first Custom Action is scheduled to run, on Publish/DoAction of a button. The weird thing is that depending on the names/number of Custom Actions I have defined, it either works or doesn't. Right now, I have six methods marked with the CustomAction attribute: SetDisplayStates, ValidateServiceAccountDialog, ValidateServerConfigDialog, ValidateLocalServerInstance, ValidateSearchProvidersDialog, and SQLServerValidate. None of these do anything, they just return ActionResult.Success. Everything compiles, and it looks like DTF is finding the custom action entry points and packaging files correctly based on the build output. But as soon as the first CA is scheduled to run, I get the error popup. If I comment out _any_ of them and rebuild, the DLL loads fine (only one is being referenced by the WIX xml code). If I significantly change the names of all the methods (e.g. "Validate1", "Validate2", etc), the DLL loads fine. I've been adding/removing/renaming methods all day and can't figure out why sometimes the DLL is loadable and sometimes it isn't. All the DLL exports seem to be there (I checked DumpBin and DependencyWalker). What the heck is going on? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Managing the Performance of Cloud-Based Applications Take advantage of what the Cloud has to offer - Avoid Common Pitfalls. Read the Whitepaper. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=121051231&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Managing the Performance of Cloud-Based Applications Take advantage of what the Cloud has to offer - Avoid Common Pitfalls. Read the Whitepaper. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=121051231&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
