So I'm trying to use the direct app install feature of Windows 10 Creators Update to allow downloading a packaged modern app from the web. The key feature of it is that it will auto update your app by checking back to the same URL of the .appinstaller file.
https://new-file-explorer.firebaseapp.com/ (the page is entirely generated by Visual Studio, no modifications from me)
The problem is that when I click it I just get "Error in parsing the app package."
If I manually download the .msixbundle that's referenced in the .appinstaller file it will work! Yet App Installer itself can't "parse" this package?
Here's the weirdest part: if I use "Add-AppxPackage -Appinstaller" from Powershell and point it towards the .appinstaller URL it will completely work!
The other answers on here do not apply, since they were all related to running it on a local server (I tried it anyways).
I thought this was related to MIME types, but I have set the MIME types as stated in the documentation and yet it still doesn't work. I've verified that by using this URL MIME type checker. I'm at a loss to what is actually causing this.
Here is the .appinstaller file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<AppInstaller Uri="https://new-file-explorer.firebaseapp.com/InstallNFE.appinstaller" Version="1.0.9.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/appx/appinstaller/2017/2">
<MainBundle Name="NewFileExplorer" Version="1.0.9.0" Publisher="CN=david" Uri="https://new-file-explorer.firebaseapp.com/InstallNFE_1.0.9.0_Test/InstallNFE_1.0.9.0_x86_x64.msixbundle" />
<UpdateSettings>
<OnLaunch HoursBetweenUpdateChecks="0" />
</UpdateSettings>
</AppInstaller>
Here's a link to the .msixbundle it appears to be incapable of parsing (as you can see, it works manually downloading it!)
Thought of putting the solution in case someone else is facing the issue. I also faced the same issue and was able to resolve myself. When opening the Windows 10 .appinstaller file from web, the error "Error in parsing the app package." occurs.
For me the cause was that the links provided in the HTML page index.html generated by Visual Studio was referring to some share location (as my installer location was a file share location) and the installer file was not there. The reason for this is that I didn't do the last step "Copy and Close" of publishing from VS (this step copies the installer from output location to installer location that you provided). Instead of "Copy and Close", I just clicked on another option "Close" and hence the issue.
Just an additional input as i also encountered this issue and spent a whole day of finding the fix.
Let me just copy a line from .appinstaller file of the original poster.
<MainBundle Name="NewFileExplorer" Version="1.0.9.0" Publisher="CN=david" Uri="https://new-file-explorer.firebaseapp.com/InstallNFE_1.0.9.0_Test/InstallNFE_1.0.9.0_x86_x64.msixbundle" />
In this line, it only specify as ".msixbundle" file but the actual file in local folder is ".msixbundle.zip".
After I removed ".zip" from the filename of the file, the issue is gone.
I am thinking consistency. I use the MessageBox Windows API function in my Windows subsystem C/C++ application built by Visual Studio 2017, like so:
MessageBox(NULL, "Error opening log file for writing, aborting.", NULL, MB_ICONERROR);
This gets me:
The message box shown by Windows when I e.g. attempt to run an invalid program using the Run dialog from the Start menu, looks like this:
It's obviously not a show stopper, but I am curious, and am surprised at this level of lack of consistency in Windows, after all the versions it's gone through. Yes, I know there is a rats nest of backwards compatibility they have to address constantly, but still.
Does this have to do with some settings I haven't specified in my manifest file, some common control styles I am not explicitly requesting? My project and solution settings are untouched, other than having specified DPI Awareness as "Per Monitor DPI aware". Turning the latter off still shows the same message box (albeit with blurry text because the system scales the rendered bitmap, as documented).
The manifest embedded by VS in the built program
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" xmlns:asmv3="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
<trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
<security>
<requestedPrivileges>
<requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker" uiAccess="false"></requestedExecutionLevel>
</requestedPrivileges>
</security>
</trustInfo>
<asmv3:application>
<asmv3:windowsSettings xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SMI/2005/WindowsSettings">
<dpiAware>true</dpiAware>
<dpiAwareness xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SMI/2016/WindowsSettings">PerMonitorV2, PerMonitor</dpiAwareness>
</asmv3:windowsSettings>
</asmv3:application>
</assembly>
I am not sure that the messagebox shown by windows in your "invalid program" scenario is using MessageBox function or a custom dialog box.
However, in order to achieve consistency maybe you can find an answer here:
https://www.codeguru.com/cpp/w-p/win32/messagebox/article.php/c14605/Fancy-Custom-MessageBox.htm#page-2
Also, here https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#system.windows.forms/winforms/managed/system/winforms/MessageBox.cs,e426fc24b95c791e you will find how it is implemented - and why the button on the message box is different than in C++ call.
You can use VBScript (.vbs) to make a message box. Write this:
Option Explicit
Dim x
x = MsgBox("Error opening log file for writing. Aborting", VbOkOnly+VbCritical, "Error")
I have a VB6 application, the installer is compiled using INNO Setup.
The installer runs fine. But in about 10% of computers when the user clicks the Icon to run the installed app, it doesn't start, no error message, only a Beep sound.
This is happening on XP and also Win 7.
I develop in XP and Win 7 and the application works OK, so I haven't been able to reproduce the issue.
The installer registers all ocx and dlls needed (afaik). (Well not completely all, it assumes MS run-time components should be there, but I guess an error message should show up if something is missing)
I was thinking some kind of user permissions, UAC, but even users in the admin group have had the issue.
Could you point me to what possible issues to look for and test in order to patch the app.
Thanks!
[FOLLOW UP]
Thanks to the tips, found out the manifest is causing the problem. I use it to make the controls look better:
http://www.vbaccelerator.com/home/vb/code/libraries/xp_visual_styles/using_xp_visual_styles_in_vb/article.asp
Now I'm trying to discover why. I have another application with the same manifest and that one works ok.
Haven't been able to get feedback on the event viewer yet.
The "beep crash" often points to an error in an application manifest such as an XML syntax error or namspace conflict. Event Logs will often provide a hint about this.
But I've found that people often try to use the Common Controls 6.0 Library without ensuring proper library loading sequence.
Before any Forms are openend you should load shell32 and then comctl32. The easiest way is a couple of no-op calls in Sub Main:
Option Explicit
Private Declare Sub InitCommonControls Lib "comctl32" ()
Private Declare Function IsUserAnAdmin Lib "shell32" () As Long
Private Sub InitCommonControlsVB()
IsUserAnAdmin
InitCommonControls
End Sub
Private Sub Main()
InitCommonControlsVB
Form1.Show
End Sub
Without this your program will usually work fine in Vista or Win7, but will fail on some XP service pack and patch levels. Part of this is due to changes over time in the Fusion subsystem that handles SxS activation and comctl32.dll patches.
Ignore those saying you need to call InitCommonControlsEx(), it isn't necessary unless you are constructing and using Win32 controls directly instead of VB6 and COM controls.
A few things to try to narrow it down:
Check the Windows Event Log for crash events
Check the Windows Event Log (in the Application section) for crash reports from your application. You can quickly get to the log viewer on Windows XP by clicking Start > Run, typing eventvwr and pressing Enter. On Windows 7, you can type "event viewer" in the search box that is in the Start menu. You can filter the events to only show error events from your program.
You might find a few error events on one of the computers where this problem has already occured, because it sounds like the error reporting feature is turned off on these computers (in which case "hard crashes" like access violations are logged in the Event Log instead of displaying an error dialog to the end-user, as long as a debugger isn't installed on the computer).
Make sure "Error Reporting" is turned at the OS level
As mentioned in the previous section, it sounds like the error reporting feature is turned off on these computers. In that case, a crash won't display any kind of message to the end-user at all and the application will just vanish suddenly. In Windows XP, you can check this setting (and turn it on) as follows:
Right-click "My Computer" and select Properties.
Open the Advanced tab and click the Error Reporting button.
Select the Enable Error Reporting option.
Click OK to all the open windows.
Add trace code to your application
You could also add some trace code to your application's start-up code, such as code to display a message box or write a message to the Windows Event Log or to a log file as soon as your application starts (for example, in the Form_Initialize event of your main form, or in a Sub Main routine).
This way you will be able to tell whether your application is crashing before or after the VB6 runtime is loaded: if you try to start the application and it disappears/crashes, and your startup message isn't logged, then you know it's crashing before it even has a chance to get to your application's startup code, which could indicate that a dependency of the VB6 runtime or the VB6 runtime itself is not installed properly.
Note that Windows XP and Windows 7 both ship with the VB6 runtime pre-installed, but it's possible for misbehaving installers to overwrite or remove files that are part of the VB6 runtime.
In Silverlight 4 app; what does this error mean?:
"Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component."
It's a very generic error. The VS debugger doesn't point to the exact location of the error when debugging.
This is kind of an old question, but I figured I'd give my answer since I found this thread by Googling for the exact same problem.
In my case, I'd copied some sample XAML from the web to get started with Silverlight Toolkit 4. That sample XAML contained a simple button with a click event handler that didn't relate to any handler that actually existed in my code behind. I didn't notice this simple problem at first, because the compiler didn't give me an error message, I just saw the "Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component" message above at runtime. It was only when I isolated my sample XAML by copying it into a brand new Silverlight application without any other content that the real underlying problem was revealed at compile-time.
So, if you've got the same error message at runtime, my advice is to check your XAML carefully for any errors that you had expected should have been picked up at compile time, but which for some reason ended up as the runtime error noted above. In order to debug, you can do what I did and isolate the code that's causing the error in a standalone Silverlight app with no other content, and see if like me you get a more helpful error message to guide you.
HTH.
There are many solutions out there but this is the only solution that worked several times for me.It has been tried on VS2012 VS2013 and VS2015, I find it working equally good for all.Just follow steps bellow to fix this issue
Step 1 : Close Visual Studio
Step 2 : Delete *.csproj.user and *.suo files
Step 3 : Reopen VS, and try to run project again in debug mode.
NOTE : This situation occurs when multiple users working on same
project with different VS versions .suo file is not supported
for round-tripping between the two VS versions.It contains information
about what settings current user has selected for his/hers VS working
environment.
In my situation:
I create a
class MyControl : ContentControl {
}
By default, the class is not public and XAML cannot load it and throw exception
Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component
Just change the scope of class to public and error disappear.
Hope this help.
PS. Microsoft should provide more on information than just throw a mystery error message without any stack trace.
I also had this error and I found that this problem is related to not have added all requiered assemblies to your project. In my case I was using a UserControl with a depency with the Silverlight Toolkit and I havent added this reference.
I just added the reference and everything solved :)
I had this error using the current SL4 Telerik controls. A similar issue has been reported here with a solution ... of sorts. The problem seems to be with the way Expression Blend manages the cache of controls.
Here's one way to generate this error, which I stumbled upon today. We have the following button in XAML:
<Button x:Name="button" Click="Button_Click" Content="Click me" />
The event handler that handles the button's Click event is as follows:
private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
button.Margin = new Thickness(0, double.NaN, 0, 0);
}
When I click on the button I get the aforementioned error. The same error arises if I replace NaN with PositiveInfinity or NegativeInfinity.
Interestingly, I get a different error message if the first parameter of the Thickness constructor contains the NaN instead of the second.
I had this error from problems with XAML. The strange thing was that I had missing resources used by Style and Margin attributes - which means the app runs fine, and even resharper only reports a 'hint'.
Once I cleared up those problems my "Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component." disappeared. As others have said though, this is a vague error, very difficult to debug. In this case I have inherited a large project with 100's of VS and ReSharper messages with varying severity - missing StaticResource on Style attributes were not the first place I checked!
I had this error in my xaml page and there were no syntax errors. Cleaning and re-building the project solved my issue. fyi...
The IIS App Pool has to run as an account that has query access to the Team Foundation Server. This fixes the problem for me.
Most of the reason of this problem related dependency propertied on component design.
You just face off this problem on design.
Soulution is easy but takes time :) Clean project and rebuild all. When you enter the desing again you should see everything is fine!
I hope this helps!
If you see this exception recently, please try to re-install silverlight sdk4.
This is a security and permissions issue. Look into the IIS and make sure Integrated Security is ON. Then set Application Protection level to Medium (If it is high then this might be the result). Then check your Web.Config file. Make sure impersonation is off.
This should help.
I had this problem while I was encoding Live video and audio (using Microsoft Expression) and the next piece of code throws the exception randomly:
// Set bitrate
liveJob.OutputFormat.VideoProfile.Bitrate = new ConstantBitrate(2500);
// Set Video size
liveJob.OutputFormat.VideoProfile.Size = new Size(320,240);
until i've figured out that the second line throws the exception while the first one is still running in another thread !
and of course, it was my fault - i've called the method in code, and it was also been called by Click event...
I had this exception and went nuts. I would advice you check if you had recently installed a component that had possible conflicting namespace items. In my case I installed the windows phone tool-kit which had items that were similarly named with the stock tool kit on windows phone.
Asap I uninstalled this from the Nuget package manager, all was back to normal.
Here is what FINALLY fixed this problem for us when trying to use MICROSOFT.TEAMFOUNDATION library when querying Team Foundation Server:
Team Foundation Explorer has to be installed with the currect version that is referenced in the application.
MSDTC – Configuration. (See DTC config below)
IIS App Pool has to run as an account that has query access to the Team Foundation Server
IIS App Pool has to run as an account that has COM access on IIS Server (We have a dedicated server for this so we made the identity user an administer on the local server).
Firewall has to be off or configured to allow COM access for DTC service.
DTC config ----
Click Start, click Run, type dcomcnfg and then click OK to open Component Services.
In the console tree, click to expand Component Services, click to expand Computers, click to expand My Computer, and click to expand Distributed Transaction Coordinator.
Right click Local DTC, and click Properties to display the Local DTC Properties dialog box.
Click the Security tab.
In the Security Settings section, click Network DTC Access.
In the Client and Administration section, select Allow Remote Clients and Allow Remote Administration.
In the Transaction Manager Communication section, select Allow Inbound and Allow Outbound.
In the Transaction Manager Communication section, select Mutual Authentication Required (if all remote machines are running Windows Server 2003 SP1 or Windows XP SP2 or higher), select Incoming Caller Authentication Required (if running MSDTC in a cluster), or select No Authentication Required if some of the remote machines are pre-Windows Server 2003 SP1 or pre-Windows XP SP2. No Authentication Required is the recommended selection.
I hope this helps.
My problem was a missing Style. I had overridden a control template with a custom brush like so:
<Style x:Key="MyCustomStyle" TargetType="Thumb">
<Setter Property="Template">
<Setter.Value>
<ControlTemplate TargetType="Thumb">
....
<TextBlock Foreground="{StaticResource MyCustomBrush}"
and was missing my definition of MyCustomBrush, like so:
<SolidColorBrush x:Key="MyCustomBrush" Color="#FFAC0909"/>
and then BOOM, app didn't startup and I got that COM error message.
Well, I was almost going to eat my computer..
At last, I find out the problem is that I MAYBE BY ACCIDENT removed one parameter of one Margin setting of an Image object in the XAML page, orz..
Margin="0,-20,0"
which should be
Margin="0,-20,0,0"
Obviously I didn't realized I have ever modified anything of the XAML, so I have been troubleshooting the code behind for "a little while"..
Fortunately, I found this post and rechecked everything include the XAML page.. that was ... something...
For me, I narrowed it down to a SplitButton control that I downloaded off CodePlex ages ago. I had upgraded the solution from Silverlight 4 to Silverlight 5 and got slammed with this error. I was able to narrow it down by commenting out the XAML to all controls then uncommented it back in one by one until the error appreared again:
System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException was unhandled by user code
Message=Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.
StackTrace:
at System.RuntimeMethodHandle.InvokeMethod(Object target, Object[] arguments, Signature sig, Boolean constructor)
at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture, Boolean skipVisibilityChecks)
at System.Delegate.DynamicInvokeImpl(Object[] args)
at System.Delegate.DynamicInvoke(Object[] args)
at Homexaml_3.BindingOperation(Object BindingState, Int32 , Action )
InnerException:
Message=Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component.
StackTrace:
at MS.Internal.XcpImports.CheckHResult(UInt32 hr)
at MS.Internal.XcpImports.UIElement_Measure(UIElement element, Size availableSize)
at System.Windows.UIElement.Measure(Size availableSize)
What fixed it was manually removing the outdated references System.Windows.Control and System.Windows.Controls.Toolkit then re-added them from the Silverlight 5 SDK folder.
Hope it helps someone (and helps me!) if it happens again a few months down the road.
I received this error recently in VS 2013 for a Silverlight 5 project. None of the above worked for me. Oddly enough, it was a threading problem (normally I am used to an exception that explains this if I am trying to create UIElements on a background thread by mistake).
Wrapping my code that adds UIElements to the MainPage with Dispatcher.BeginInvoke solved the problem:
Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() =>
{
// your code
});
Most of the times its difficult to see where exactly the problem is located especially in XAML.
Another way to find out where its failing is to perform the following steps
Copy the exception it shows in the output window of Visual Studio. example. System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException
Click on Debug -> Exceptions. It shows up the exception list.
Click on the "Add.." button.
Paste the exception copied in the step 1 in the text box. Select "Common Language Runtime exceptions" in the drop down list.
Click on "Ok" button. The selected exception will be highlighted. Make sure you check the checkbox against the exception. Click on "Ok" button again to close the dialog.
Now run the application in debug mode. The application breaks when the exception occurs. Sometimes in the assembler mode as well.
At this point in time you have two options,
Click on the View details of the exception screen shown. Dig into
the inner exceptions until you get a clue from where its
originating.
View the call stack to see which code of line of your is causing
this exception. This will provide clues to resolve the issue.
For me, this was a XAML parsing error. In a data template, I had an extra S between two tags (probably because I pressed S instead of CTRL+S). For example...
<DataTemplate>
<Border/>s
</DataTemplate>
So, I would suggest you look for poorly formatted XML in the view that causes this exception when displayed.
In my case it was, when I tried to import database into the SSDT project, but this database already was in project, but was empty. I've just updated my project with Tools -> SQL server -> New schema comparsion. Source - database, target - project. Compare - update.
Hope it helps to someone
This error seems to be a 'catch-all' for errors that otherwise are not given a specific definition or tracing, especially those having to do with relatively external Xaml code.
In my particular case, there seemed to be an issue with the namespaces. My UserControl is in its own namespace (creatively named "UserControls"). My Pages are in their own namespace ("Pages"). I wanted to reference an enum definition in the Pages namespace from within my UserControl, so I simply added a using statement: using MySolution.Pages;. Trivial enough, and I didn't want to believe that this was the problem. But when I removed that using statement and simply created the enum in my UserControls namespace, voila, no more HRESULT error and also, as an added bonus, my dependency properties defined in the UserControl, which otherwise were mysteriously not showing up in the Xaml intellisense, suddenly were there and ready to use.
I suspect that underlying cause for this in my case was some sort of circular reference issue. And since there was no more specific error available to relate that information to me, it simply got shuffled into this HRESULT E_FAIL Com error.
I fixed this error by deleting the XAML file and add a new one from add new item. Then I pasted the XAML codes that was there in the old file.
This is an old question but in my case, none of the above solutions worked. I was trying to update the NuGet packages in Visual Studio 2017 but I was getting the following Exception.
update-package : Failed to add reference to 'System.Web.Razor'.
Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component.
In fact, other NuGet commands like restore-package were failing with similar exception message.
I discovered a few assemblies were missing under the packages directory so I deleted the packages directory and returned back to the Visual Studio 2017. When I opened the solution it asked me to restore the packages and after that, I was able to update the packages.
NOTE: Take a backup of package directory before deleting it.
I encountered this same error after installing VS2019 and trying to open a large solution (20+ projects), with both vcxproj and csproj projects, that target VS2015. The csproj all loaded fine, while the vcxproj all failed with the OP's error. Deleting the .vs folder did not work.
What did work was setting VC++'s "Fallback Location", under the "Browsing Database Fallback" settings.
Tools (menu)
-Options...
--Text Editor
---C/C++
---Advanced
----Browsing Database Fallback
-----Fallback Location
I set mine to D:\VC++\v16. Where I use v140 for VS2015 and v141 for VS2017. Also set "Always Use" and "Do not warn".
If anyone facing this issue, while adding reference in console/windows applications, follow the below steps
Open "Developer Command Prompt for VS 2017" as Admin
CD into "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies"
Run "gacutil -i Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.11.0.dll"
Restart Visualstudio
Reference - https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/add-a-reference-raise-error-error-hresult-e-fail-h/260196