Visual Studio 2010 Setup/Deployment Project targeting Windows 2000

Question

I'm currently working on a C#/.NET project in Visual Studio 2010. The target framework for this application is .NET 2. As for the deployment of this project on my target system, I'm using a Deployment Project in my Visual Studio solution.

As for installing my binaries on a XP (or higher) system, there's no problem. But when I try to deploy on a Windows 2000 system, my Setup.exe will not work. It will immediately throw an exception The procedure entry point GetNativeSystemInfo could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.DLL.

I do have Windows Installer 3.1 on my Windows 2000 system. My guess is that this problem is because Windows 2000 doesn't support installers created by Visual Studio 2010, but I wonder if someone can confirm that. An if so - is there a workaround in VS 2010 or do I need to build my solution on, let's say, VS 2008?

Cheers!

Answer 1

Since I couldn't really solve this problem, the best workaround for me in this case was to simply rebuild my project in VS 2008. Solution files built in VS 2010 are not backwards compatible with VS 2010, so I had to create a new solution in VS 2008 and add all my projects from VS 2010 to that solution.