VS2005 Setup and Deployment - MSI Installer on reboot - visual-studio-2005

I built a VS 2005 Setup and Deployment project and i'm able to install the setup without any problems. But, if I reboot my computer, the setup utility is being run again, asking me to install the software again (It already exists). I have not run into this problem before, any help would be greatly apperciated.
Thanks!

Check the Event Log, it will show what missing component/file/whatever is causing the installer to run.
Try enabling Windows Installer Logging and looking at the log files to see what might be failing.
Validate your resulting MSI using Orca, it's available as part of the Windows Installer 4.5 SDK (look for orca.msi in the TOOLS folder)

Related

SQL Server Management Studio set-up exe does not launch

Attempting to launch the SQL Server Management Studio set-up exe leads to an icon briefly appearing in the taskbar, before disappearing without any further screen showing up. The task manager does not show any running instance for the installer either.
I have tried various versions of the SSMS installer executables posted on Microsoft's official documentation for SSMS, including version 18.8, 18.7.1, and 17.9.1.
Also tried updating the .NET framework, as suggested here (Why the SSMS-setup-ENU for version 17.8.1 isn't running?), but the latest version is already showed as having been installed.
I did a soft and hard reboot both, without success.
Confused as to how to proceed and install the software now. Any help would be appreciated.

Installing VS2005 on Windows 7

I'm trying to install Visual Studio 2005 on a Windows 7 box but am repeatedly getting the same error. When I run the installer it starts to run then pops up with a message saying:
"A problem has been encountered while loading the setup components. Canceling setup."
Various suggestions has said that maybe the install is corrupted so I downloaded a fresh copy of the ISO from MSDN today, same issue. Another suggestion is that installing from the ISO may be the issue so I extracted the contents of the ISO to a folder on my HDD, same issue. I have also tried running the files as administrator and in XP compatability mode, same issue.
Searching for this issue the most common responses I've found have been about installing SP1, however I cannot get the base product to install and therefore cannot apply SP1.
Does anyone have any further suggestions as to what I can do to fix this issue and get VS2005 installed? If anyone wants any log files of any variety I am happy to supply so long as you tell me where to look as I'm not sure.
As for why I am using VS2005 and not a newer product, it is required for the ongoing support and maintenance of some older applications we manage. These cannot be easily migrated to a newer version of Visual Studio without some considerable investment of time and that would probably be longer than the time it will take to develop newer, replacement applications (which is currently in progress). Until the new applications are available though we need to maintain an environment to use.
Did you try running setup.exe in compatibility mode with Windows XP? Some discussion here on how to do this.
Another alternative since you alluded to having an MSDN subscription. Download Windows XP and install it into a VM. (If HyperV isn't already in installed with your Win7, you can add it from Control Panel->Programs&Features->Turn Windows Features on/off). Then install VS2005 from there.

Installer package targeting Windows Installer 3.1 fails when Windows Installer 4.5 has been installed

We have an installer package authored with InstallShield 2009, targeting Windows Installer 3.1.
Recently, we started to notice that sometime, when installing on some Windows 2003 R2 x86 based hosts, the installation fails, and the installer log report a 1603 error code (which by the way, doesn't really help much, as it means ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE, that is a very generic "A fatal error occurred during installation.").
As the installation is still working on some other hosts on that very same platform, after further investigation we found out it was happening on hosts where Sql Server 2008 R2 was already installed, which leaded us to find out the issue is really with Windows Installer 4.5.
Whenever Windows Installer 4.5 was installed by an installer package, our installer package is failing with 1603. So far, we found as a work around: if we manually uninstall Windows Installer 4.5 (running something like "C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB942288-v4$\spuninst\spuninst.exe"), we can then run our installer package successfully, but this has various drawbacks:
the user who uninstall Windows Installer 4.5 is prompted with a dialog listing all the various software products installed using that, and effectively the link between those products and Windows Installer 4.5 is lost after uninstalling that, even if we reinstall it after successfully installing our application;
as Microsoft released various version of Windows Installer 4.5, the location of the utility to uninstall that is not strictly the one given above;
It is awkward to ask customers to perform such a work around.
I suppose upgrading the installer package to target Windows Installer 5 may solve the issue, but if possibile I would like to avoid it, and continuing to use InstallShield 2009 to author this specific package.
I have scoured the Microsoft and Flexera Knowledge Bases (and I am continuing my investigation), with no avail so far.
Does anyone knows if Microsoft or Flexera, or any other third party, have published an hotfix, or some further info, about this issue?
Some info about the 1603 error code failure
We got verbose logs for this issue, from at least 3 different servers, and we have investigated that in depth, to not avail so far. Most actions return 1, some 0 (specifically IsolateComponents, MigrateFeatureStates, IsolateComponents, SetODBCFolders, MigrateFeatureStates, UnpublishComponents, UnregisterComPlus, UnregisterTypeLibraries, UnregisterMIMEInfo, RemoveShortcuts, RemoveFiles, CreateShortcuts, RegisterMIMEInfo, InstallODBC, RegisterTypeLibraries, RegisterComPlus and PublishComponents, but nothing has yet came out investigating those), the installer package seems actually to be almost able to install (perform all the sequence down to "INSTALL. Return value 1.", it even prints "Product: [Our Product] -- Installation operation completed successfully."), only then it starts to rollback everything, and as there are various errors on the rollback, I think some of those will cause the 1603 (probably some 1607 returned by MsiProvideAssembly on ISChainPackagesCleanup), but the point is that it shouldn't rollback, and with Windows Installer 3.1 (or 5.x for that matter) it doesn't, it does rollback only when there is Windows Installer 4.5 installed on a Windows 2003 x86 environment.
Most likely your package has an action which fails, either custom or standard. Try creating a verbose log of the installation which fails (it's very important to be verbose). After the failure, open the log with a text editor and search for the error code (1603) to see what triggers it.
As a side note, don't try to blame Windows Installer. There's nothing wrong with version 4.5 and there are no hotfixes or something like that. The problem is in your package. It does something which is either incorrect or unsupported.
EDIT:
From your post update it looks like a failed chained installation. No errors are shown in the log because the error occurs in a different installer process.
If you are not using chained packages, try looking for errors in the Event Viewer.
If you are using chained packages, you can try enabling the Windows Installer logging policy and check for logs generated by them. Most likely one of the packages is encountering a problem.

windows service msi installer created in vs2003 hangs in win7 while installing

We have few windows services developed using .Net framework 1.1(VS2003).For each windows service an msi installer(set up project) is created to make installation easier.These installers are able to install windows services successfully in windows XP.But these installers unable to install windows service in WIN7 though I have admin privileges on the machine in which I am trying install them.While I am trying to install the windows service in win7, Through msi installer,installation is progressing till 90%.After that it is neither completing nor throwing an error.I am unable to understand what the problem is.
I tried following ways.
1.Opened cmd window in admin mode and tried to execute the msi with the command msiexec -i --Din't work
2.Right clicked on the actual exe(windows service exe) file and tried to run it in admin mode.--Din't work
3.Changed the UAC to never notify, restarted the machine and then tried to install--Din't work
4.Right clicked on both exe and msi and open their properties and changed the compatibility to lower version of windows and tried to install--Din't work
One thing I have noticed is that for all the custom actions of our windows service installer, primary output of our main project(exe) was given as input.I build the msi installer by removing all the custom actions.Then i tried to install it in win7.Then it was installed.But during the installation system not prompted for account details (which is the actual case while installing windows service) and also the service was not appeared in services manager window.
I spent somuch time to identify the cause and resolution.But I dint find any posts on this issue.I suspect that the problem is with custom actions.But not sure.If the problem is with custom actions please let me know how to overcome it.
Please provide a resolution for this issue or share me if there are any links which talks about this.
FWIW, .NET 1.1 isn't supported on Win7. Also I'm guessing you are using InstallUtil custom actions to drive the setup of your .NET Windows Service. These are very fragile and you can eliminate all those brittle points by refactoring and using the ServiceInstall ServiceControl tables in MSI.

Unable to start/debug program

I recently installed Visual Studio 2010 to help me with some exercises for class.
It all worked great in school but when I got home and tried to run and debug the second program I got this error:
Unable to start ...\Kapitel_1\Debug\Kapitel_1.exe
This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Review the manifest file for possible errors. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem. For more details, please see the application event log.
How can this be solved?
This message generally means that the machine on which you built the application did not have the same redistributables than the system where you run the application.
Redistributables are sets of DLLs needed for your application to run properly.
In your case, I noticed that you are trying to run a debug build. That might just be the problem: you cannot run an application or use a DLL that has been built in debug configuration on a system with no debugger installed. Installing Visual Studio (ideally the same version your school has) should do the trick. You could also rebuild your application in Release configuration to avoid having to install a debugger on the running system.
Another case where this error message might be displayed is if you just installed a new Visual Studio update on the system that built the application and not on the system where you are trying to run it. In that case, you would need to update your system with the latest set of redistributables from Microsoft (at time of writing, here was a good place to look for that).

Resources