One of the tasks as we approach the finalisation of a product version is to of course make sure that it is appropriately packaged. For the most part this has been done along the way to ensure we can easily deploy the application. Unfortunately we have out grown the capabilities of Visual Studio 2005 so I have been reviewing other products such as InstallShield and Wise (would love to hear from anyone about their preferences in this area). Today was InstallShield’s day to show how good/bad it was. Everything installed fine, it was able to create quite a complex installer and “seemed” to uninstall correctly (which you would of course hope for given that’s what they do).
A couple of hours later I am on another task to look at the existing installation packages we have and all I’m getting from VS is ERROR: An error occurred while validating. HRESULT = ‘80040155’. Initially I thought it was something I had done so I went through the project and made sure everything was correct. Eventually I gave up and Googled it. Thankfully this post pointed me here where there is a knowledgebase article about this issue. Now hang on, they say that it has been resolved in “Developer 7.04 and above” – well I’m not sure what version I installed but I downloaded the evaluation software today, so I would hope that it is “above” and that it shouldn’t have this issue.
Despite them having a great product, I just don’t think I can bring myself to purchase a product that is going to generate Installers that don’t uninstall properly!!!