Prerequisite button in Installer project crashes Visual Studio 2015

3
votes

I installed the Installer Project Visual Studio 2015 extension and added an Installer project to an existing solution. Whenever I click on the Prerequisites button in the properties for the Installer project, VS crashes. I already rebooted the machine. Using Windows 7 64bit.

Any ideas?

3
visual-studio-2015

3 Answers

4
votes

Had a look at the official Q&A of the Extension you are using - link here (You'll need to search for the question "When I show the Prerequisites dialog, why does this crash?" - probably on the oldest page of questions) - and as described, the bug was fixed.

Just download from the page above and install. You can do a fresh install and uninstall previous version of the extension before reinstalling the newer ones but in my case that wasn't necessary.

0
votes

Same for me on fresh install of VS2015, followed by installation of the installer project extension.

You can work around the problem with editing the installer project file (*.vdproj):

  1. Open the YOUR-SETUP-PROJECT-NAME.vdproj file in a text editor
  2. Search for "Release", including the quotation marks (or any custom configuration profile name you are targeting)
  3. Make sure you found s. th. similar to the structure I inserted below and that your found structure is below/within a section named "Configurations"
  4. Either: completely disable the installer bootstrapper prerequisites with changing "Enabled" = "11:TRUE" to "Enabled" = "11:FALSE"
  5. Alternatively: edit the "Items" list to suit your needs (you have to search for the correct entries there, of course - maybe you have an older installation of VS to produce the entries you need, or you may find matching entries via web search)

My section now looks like that:

"Release"
{
"DisplayName" = "8:Release"
"IsDebugOnly" = "11:FALSE"
"IsReleaseOnly" = "11:TRUE"
"OutputFilename" = "8:Release\\My Setup File Name.msi"
"PackageFilesAs" = "3:2"
"PackageFileSize" = "3:-2147483648"
"CabType" = "3:1"
"Compression" = "3:2"
"SignOutput" = "11:FALSE"
"CertificateFile" = "8:"
"PrivateKeyFile" = "8:"
"TimeStampServer" = "8:"
"InstallerBootstrapper" = "3:2"
    "BootstrapperCfg:{63ACBE69-63AA-4F98-B2B6-99F9E24495F2}"
    {
    "Enabled" = "11:FALSE"
    "PromptEnabled" = "11:TRUE"
    "PrerequisitesLocation" = "2:1"
    "Url" = "8:"
    "ComponentsUrl" = "8:"
        "Items"
        {
        }
    }
}

As you can see, I followed the path to completely disable those prerequisites which is fine for our use cases, but may be different for others of course.

0
votes

If you are moving an old project from an earlier version of Visual Studio, you should first download the Setup Installer templates from here: Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Installer Projects

Remove your old setup project, then create a new setup project based on the new template. Problem solved!