Saturday, January 19, 2013

Visual Studio 2012 does not provide an installer! Also notes migrating from visual studio 2008 to 2012


What the what! Visual Studio can't build a Windows Setup.exe anymore? This seems ludicrous on the face of it, but there are alternatives. No, my VS 2008 installer project did not work in 2012. I got an 'incompatible' error. Luckily, it wasn't very good so I just dumped and I'm starting over. 


I'm going to give InstallShield a go because its free and I don't think my installer needs are very complicated right now. WiX is the kitchen sink if you need it.

Getting started with InstallShield LE, from MSDN.

Here is a 5 minute video on how to quickly setup Install Shield LE via VS 2010. The audio is brutal, its like Kramer pretending to be the MovieFone audio prompt.

After installing InstallShield LE it makes you restart your computer. Flashback to Windows 98.

Otherwise my solution migrated to VS 2012 with no problems. 

Certificate Problem
Then I did a rebuild I got this error:

Error 1 Cannot import the following key file: . The key file may be password protected. To correct this, try to import the certificate again or import the certificate manually into the current user’s personal certificate store.

I don't know what this means but something on Stackoverflow says its the .pfx file. I found 2 of them and just deleted them from my project.

Then I get this error:

Error 1 Unable to find manifest signing certificate in the certificate store.

Ugh, found a blog entry which solved this by removing certificate signing all together. If I need to sign this application, I'll figure that out later. 

Last thing, switched from .NET 3.5 to 4.5. Just open project Properties and change the framework. Easy enough. I can run the program from VS 2012! 

Now to get the new installer implemented.

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