Servicing a large product like Visual Studio or a side-by-side component like the .NET Framework is no small task and is full of challenges. This blog currently describes some of those challenges in hopes of helping others avoid some of the same problems.Today, a site dedicated to servicing Visual Studio and the .NET Framework has launched on MSDN ...
On an internal alias - which inspires many of my blog entries - someone wasn't able to run the sample bootstrap executable setup.exe, found in the Samples/SysMgmt/Msi/Setup.exe folder in your Platform SDK installation root. The error was "setup.exe is not a valid Win32 application" when run on Windows 2000 but the sample worked fine on Wi...
If you're patching a feature or features of a Windows Installer package and see that a feature you know to be installed locally is now advertised, look for the following in your Windows Installer log:MSI (c) (B8:C0) [12:00:00:000]: SELMGR: ComponentId '{01234567-89AB-CDEF-0123-456789ABCDEF}' is registered to feature 'FeatureA', but is not present i...
If you have authored a custom action into your installer package and are annoyed by the console window that always pops up when the custom action runs, it's because the custom action executable is running under the console subsystem.When you link your object files with the VC++ linker you can specify the subsystem using the /SUBSYSTEM switch. If y...
If you've ever tried to install a Windows Installer package and had returned (1618) it's because the Windows Installer execution server is already processing another install, administrative install, or advertisement action. That is, Windows Installer is processing the InstallExecuteSequence table, the AdminExecuteSequence table, or the AdvtExecute...
Microsoft announced Windows Live back in November. Since then I've used several of the new services, including my favorite - Windows Live Local (previously MSN Virtual Earth in an earlier incarnation). One service to which I just couldn't see any benefit yet (I know, it's still beta) was Windows Live Favorites.Years ago Netscape 4 had a feature I l...
Someone wondered if the following found in a Windows Installer log was indeed an error:MSI (c) (A8:A0) [14:38:51:427]: Transforming table Error.MSI (c) (A8:A0) [14:38:51:427]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038Recall from Diagnosing Installation Errors that field 1 in the second line indicates the Windows Installer error. If you look that up in ...
Below is a running list of posts with guidelines for exposing types from .NET to COM clients. I make occasional updates and will add newer updates to the top of this list. This article serves as an easy reference point with a user-friendly URL to which others or I can refer.
Sometime back I posted Guidelines for COM Interoperability from .NET where I enumerated several practices to follow when exposing types from your managed assemblies to COM. This update is to provide some additional information with the release of the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 as well as correct one statement I made with regard to inheritting int...
Some people have noticed that mscoree.lib in the Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 2005VCPlatfromSDKLib directory is older than the release date for .NET 2.0. If you run dumpbin.exe on the two libraries you'll see vastly different time stamps:> dumpbin.exe /headers "Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8VCPlatfromSDKLibmscoree.lib"Dump of fil...
