Internal build error with InstallShield 2011 LE within Visual Studio 2010 - WPF desktop app installer

Question

I've enabled InstallShield 2011 LE within Visual Studio 2010 and am trying to get my first installer built with it. My application is a WPF / .NET 4.0 application. The solution is quite heavy with about 30 projects, most of them Prism modules.

Whenever I build my solution InstallShield gives me a "-6213 Internal build error" during or after the Building File Table step with no further information in its log. It may not be related but I have found Visual Studio to be extremely unstable while working with this InstallShield setup project. It has crashed numerous times.

I have been able to create an installer successfully this way from a very simple WPF test solution.

Can anyone give me any pointers on how to debug this further?

Answer 1

InstallShield has a feature that I detest called Dependency Scanning. It's basically where it scans your assemblies and automagically figures out what you meant to deploy. Sounds great, right? Well, in my world that's punting responsibility for determinstically authoring what does and doesn't go into the installer. Many people new to installers want to refuse to believe me and that's your right to do so. But if it was me, I'd turn this off.

So basically the linked document says there is a bug of unknown cause that will break the build during this scanning. My guess is that something you are doing in Prism is way out of bounds of what InstallShield can handle so poof goes your build.

I will mention though that fellow StackOverlow contributor Michael Urman happens to work for InstallShield and if you have a reproducible scenario he just might be interested in getting some test data from you.

Q109089: ERRDOC: Build Error 6213