I have setup/install project in VS2010 which includes a CustomAction component packaged as a class library DLL.
My CustomAction dll is attempting to use the UWS.Configuration namespace components added as a reference.

When I run my setup.exe, i get an error:
Error 1001. Exception occurred while initializing the installation:
System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Files' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified..


The file it is looking for is not listed, but I suspect it has something to do with the following dependency:
FirewallAPI.dll.

Here is screen shot of my custom action dll project References. When you add the reference you can see that the setup project (which includes my custom action dll) will now detect some dependencies (see second screen shot).

The exception is handled by the windows installer when it can't load my custom action dll. So I don't get a chance to handle the exception in my code because it doesn't load.

I am installing my application on same computer as I installed UWS. I am assuming that the UWS install ran correctly based on the UWS install log. I am running setup.exe as administrator.
I tried to exclude the 4 dependencies but the same error results.
I don't think install is going to be able to load dlls from the C:\Windows\SysWOW64 folder.

I had not looked at the command line utility. I just chose the .NET api method as the most appropriate for what I was doing. I hope you can sort it out. Let me know if I can help.

It looks like the command line utility has similar/same options. I won't be able to try it out this week anymore. I can look into it next week perhaps.

Chris,

Turns out, we were unable to reproduce the problem. We marked all the assemblies you have highlighted as excluded, because all of them are in GAC or PATH, and we were able to make our test project work.

The cause of failure of our test project that registers ASP.NET Application using UWS Configuration API was MSI "error 1001 could not find xxxx.InstallState file". To make the problem go away we simply made sure that Install custom step in Setup project is hooked up to the assembly with custom action implementation, even though it does override Install method.


Attached is the sample Visual Studio 2010 solution that uses Installer class, Setup project's custom actions, and UWS.Configuration API to register/unregister a simple ASP.NET application. Please try to build it and see if this installation fails as well.

Best regards,
UltiDev Team.

Oh yeah, the trailing backslash in TARGETDIR - that's the most bizarre requirement in existence, it has no merit and therefore there is nothing embarrassing in not knowing about it. Visual Studio setup project is quite a sham. Little things like this is why we went with recommending command line-based application registration instead of installer class and UWS configuration API. UltiDev Cassini experience shown us that command line is easier for developers.

There is no real reason behind putting application registration into the Commit action, Install should work just as fine.

Thank you for contributing your solution to the knowledge pool!

Best regards,
UltiDev Team.