Installer setup project not registering COM DLLs
I'm current using Visual Studio 2005 beta to create an installer which contains both .NET assemblies and a Delphi COM DLL. Reading the documentation, the DLL can be registered during installation by setting its Register property to vsdrfCOM. Unfortunately, when building the installer, the following warning appears:
Unable to create registration information for file named 'Component.dll'
(As an aside, this should really be an error, as the component isn't registered when the installer runs.) I did what everyone does with an error message, and pasted it into the Google. There were only a few results, some of which were duplicates, and none of which were helpful.
So I did what everyone else does, and randomly tried the other settings: vsdrfCOMSelfReg caused the warning to disappear, but caused errors when the installer ran. So I set it back to vsdrfDoNotRegister, which (clearly) didn't register the DLL after installing it.
So, back to basics. I checked that the DLL would actually register with regsvr32, and it did. The next logical step would be to write a batch file to run regsvr32 on the component as a custom action in the installer. Upon adding a custom action, I found that the only actions that can be added are .exe, .dll, .vbs and .js files. VBScript seemed the easiest, so I wrote a script that called regsvr32 through a shell object:
Dim WshShell
Set WshShell = CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
WshShell.run "regsvr32 /s Component.dll"
Set WshShell = nothing
and added this to the Install section of the of the custom actions. I did the reverse (using the /u regsvr32 flag) and added this to the Uninstall section. This works, but the .vbs files are deployed with the application. It's a bit messy, but it's the first thing that works. Ideally, Visual Studio would understand the DLL, and maybe it does it the RTM version.
Unable to create registration information for file named 'Component.dll'
(As an aside, this should really be an error, as the component isn't registered when the installer runs.) I did what everyone does with an error message, and pasted it into the Google. There were only a few results, some of which were duplicates, and none of which were helpful.
So I did what everyone else does, and randomly tried the other settings: vsdrfCOMSelfReg caused the warning to disappear, but caused errors when the installer ran. So I set it back to vsdrfDoNotRegister, which (clearly) didn't register the DLL after installing it.
So, back to basics. I checked that the DLL would actually register with regsvr32, and it did. The next logical step would be to write a batch file to run regsvr32 on the component as a custom action in the installer. Upon adding a custom action, I found that the only actions that can be added are .exe, .dll, .vbs and .js files. VBScript seemed the easiest, so I wrote a script that called regsvr32 through a shell object:
Dim WshShell
Set WshShell = CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
WshShell.run "regsvr32 /s Component.dll"
Set WshShell = nothing
and added this to the Install section of the of the custom actions. I did the reverse (using the /u regsvr32 flag) and added this to the Uninstall section. This works, but the .vbs files are deployed with the application. It's a bit messy, but it's the first thing that works. Ideally, Visual Studio would understand the DLL, and maybe it does it the RTM version.
