David Blomqvist

The installer was interrupted before Application could be installed - Installation success or error status: 1603

blomqvist — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 22:44:00 GMT

I was trying to install a web app that another team member built. this failed with the message:
“The installer was interrupted before <MyApp> could be installed. You need to restart the installer to try again.”

Trying again is (obviously) meaningless, it will just fail over and over. And the error message is very general, something failed.
In the eventlog we can find this error:
Installation success or error status: 1603

If we run the installer again but with verbose logging:
msiexec /i MyInstaller.msi /v setup.log

The we can find the same error but with some more stuff

INFO   : [11/11/2010 17:19:32:674] [SetTARGETSITE]: Custom Action is starting...
INFO   : [11/11/2010 17:19:32:674] [SetTARGETSITE]: CoInitializeEx - COM initialization Apartment Threaded...
ERROR : [11/11/2010 17:19:32:677] [SetTARGETSITE]: FAILED:    -2147221164
ERROR : [11/11/2010 17:19:32:677] [SetTARGETSITE]: Custom Action failed with code: '340'
INFO   : [11/11/2010 17:19:32:678] [SetTARGETSITE]: Custom Action completed with return code: '340'
CustomAction WEBCA_SetTARGETSITE returned actual error code 1603 (note this may not be 100% accurate if translation happened inside sandbox)
Action ended 17:19:32: WEBCA_SetTARGETSITE. Return value 3.
MSI (c) (EC:6C) [17:19:32:680]: Doing action: FatalErrorForm

So what is this?

It turns out that the installer cannot speak the the IIS7 properly. It needs some IIS6 compatibility in order to do that.
Go to: Control Panel > Programs > Turn Windows features on or off
and then activate “IIS Metabase and IIS 6 configuration compatibility”

And now the installer worked.

My setup:
Windows 7, IIS 7, standard VS 2010 web setup project configured for .net 4, .net 4 installed and registered in the IIS.

Edited:

If you are on a Server 2008 you will find the setting here:

Server Manager > Roles

Integration with Office from Team Explorer stopped working–and how to fix it!

blomqvist — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 21:31:00 GMT

Last week my office integration from Team Explorer stopped working. the Team menu in excel was gone and when I tried to open a WI-query from VS I got this error message:

TF80012: The document cannot be opened because there is a problem with the installation of the Microsoft Visual Studio v10.0 Team foundation Office integration components. Please see the Team Foundation Installation Guide for more information.

First I tried to fix this by repairing the Team Explorer, this did not fix the problem. The I found a blog post suggesting that re-registration of the Office add-in might solve it. The command is:

For 64-bit windows:
Regsvr32 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\TFSOfficeAdd-in.dll"

or it you have 32-bit windows:
Regsvr32 "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\TFSOfficeAdd-in.dll"

And this fixed the problem! The menu is back in Excel and i can open queries from VS into office applications.
My environment, for reference: Windows 7 x64, VS 2010, Office 2010 32-bit

New Blank Solution in Visual Studio 2010

blomqvist — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:49:25 GMT

The option to create solutions from the file menu have not been available for several generations of Visual Studio now. But new for the 2010 version is that Visual Studio does not ask me where I want my new project and solution. It always put the in My Documents:

C:\Users\db\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects

If you want put your projects somewhere else, or just want a blank solution without a project. The You should open “Other Project Types/Visual Studio Solutions” where “Blank solution” is available. This is much nicer than the other way I have seen suggested other places: to create a project to get a solution and then delete the project from it.

Copy diagram with swimlanes in Enterprise Architect

blomqvist — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 11:04:10 GMT

This is a post mostly to myself, so that when I forget this I can come here and check it out :)
(I forget about ctrl-b from time to time)

When copying diagrams from Enterprise Architect you can use ctrl-B to include the swim-lanes. A normal ctrl-c will not give you the swim-lanes. A side effect is that ctrl—b gives you a copy of the whole diagram, you cannot select what objects to copy. So marking objects first or pressing ctrl-A to selects all is both unnecessary and meaningless since ctrl-b seems to mean: “copy the whole diagram now and include all the stuff in there, even the swimlanes” (which ctrl-A, ctrl-C does not).

VS2010 changes your ASP.NET Version on setup projects to 4 - regardless

blomqvist — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 11:49:43 GMT

When converting your projects to VS2010 you get the question to migrate them to .net4. But even if you do not do that VS set the ASP.NET version to 4 for setup projects.

And then when you try to install your application on a machine that does not have .NET 4 installed you will get the error message:

“Could not open key: Software\Microsoft\ASP.NET\4.0.30128.0. Verify that you have sufficient access to that key, or contact your support personnel”

What you need to do is to change the ASP.NET version back to 2.0 if that is what you want to use.
You do that in the properties of the setup project.

EntSSO stopped working

blomqvist — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 09:20:07 GMT

My EntSSO (Enterprise Single Sign-On Server, part of BizTalk) did not start today, with the message:

The SSO service failed to start.
Error Code: 0x80131700

Could not create SSOSQL. To fix the problem, reinstall SSO or try 'regasm SSOSQL.dll' from a Visual Studio command prompt.
Error Code: 0x80131700

The only reason for this that I can think of is that I have just installed the .net framework 4.0 RC but I have not verified this. The solution suggest in the error message works like a charm!

Open a Visual Studio command prompt and run this command:
regasm ‘C:\Program Files\Common Files\Enterprise Single Sign-On\SSOSQL.dll’

Problem solved!

Bluetooth drivers for Dell Latitude D830

blomqvist — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:24:37 GMT

I haven’t been using Bluetooth on my D830 before but now I got myself a Bluetooth mouse in order to get rid of the receiver for a wireless mouse. And then I discovered that Bluetooth did not work anymore after I installed Win7.

Browsing Dell support pages for a a driver found me one (browsing by computer model etc..). But that drivers does not work. Installation looks ok and everything but no devices are found. i kept looking and found this driver, also at Dells site:

http://support.us.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R231570&formatcnt=1&libid=0&typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&fileid=333170

And that one worked!
Problem solved an I am now happily using my Bluetooth mouse instead.

You already have all those icons

blomqvist — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:12:40 GMT

Icons for that “little application” have always been a problem for me, finding something that looks ok. And now i discovered that I have been sitting right on top of a whole bunch of them all the time. They are on your machine already if you have Visual Studio installed!

You find them here (if you have system drive=C: and 64-bit windows):
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\VS2010ImageLibrary\1033

Read more about it here at MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms246582(VS.100).aspx

Visual Studio 2010 RC Ultimate includes Team Explorer

blomqvist — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 08:35:36 GMT

When the 2010 RC was released I installed it to replace the Beta2. An on top of that I installed the Team Explorer that was released at the same time. That is not the way to go! The Team Explorer is now already included in Visual Studio 2010 RC Ultimate and there is no need to install it separately as you had to do with earlier versions of Visual Studio.

In fact you should NOT install it. The Team Explorer install makes Visual Studio behave strange when you do this. When I build setup applications (web applications in this case to be exact) Visual Studio displays a dialog telling you:

“Please wait while Windows configures Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Shell (Integrated) – ENU…”

And it takes a long time to build the project. Like 10 minutes instead of 30 seconds.

The solution is to uninstall the Team Explorer.

This is the only issues that I have seen with this, it might be the only thing or there might be more, I do not know. But this behaviour is confirmed by MS and they will have it fixed in the RTM version.

Windows 7 Sticky Notes

blomqvist — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:14:19 GMT

One thing that I like about windows 7 is the sticky notes app. I have seen several discussions about the default font, mainly that people don’t like it. I don’t like it either and it is not possible to change the font in the Sticky Notes but you can solve the problem with a workaround. Sticky Notes accepts the formatting of the text when you paste it from another application. What I usually do is to keep one instance of wordpad open, type my text there and then paste it into a new note when I need one. Or just do this for the first note, then copy a piece of text from the one onto the new one. This will give you the formatting that you want.

What do I use them for?

I have replaced my “TODO” paper that I used to have, with a listing of what to do today. Just to keep track of what to do. For this purpose I find the electronic task system to complicated. Like Outlooks task, they are great for things that shall be performed before a task at or before a specific date. But it is to complicated for my simple list of “today's work”.

So now I have my own little one day sprint planning board on my desktop. I just split the background image of windows into TODO, DOING, DONE and move around my sticky notes. Hopefully the TODO section is empty by the end of the day. And I just delete things when they are not needed anymore. But putting the notes i DONE serves to purposes. It gives a nice feeling of having accomplished some work during the day and it gives me a good picture of what I have done when it is time to do my time reporting.

So my desktop looks like this: