.NET 4.0 upgrade error on MSI install - XML does not contain expected attribute error

Question

We have an MSI to install windows service on client machine. Windows service calls the web service of our server to perform operations. Initially both the MSI and web service were built using .NET 2.0 framework.

Last quarter we upgraded our systems to .NET 4.0. Though our web service is still ASP.NET i.e. asmx (and not WCF). Also I did set framework 4.0 as the prerequisite for MSI to install.

One of our clients reported this issue:

Client was using .NET framework 2.0, and had the older version of MSI installed in his system. When he tried to installed the .NET framework 4.0 version of the MSI, was prompted to install framework 4.0 (because of the prerequisite). Once the framework installation finished, he tried to install the MSI and got this error. Can someone please guide me to the resolution. I can provide details if needed.

EDIT 1:

On more research, I found it is my AppName.installstate file. Uninstall removes this file, but upgrade does not do it. The file is lying in the install directory. On a closer look I can see "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/:Envelope" in the file contents. Any pointer would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT 2:

Custom action Install creates AppName.installstate file and custom action Uninstall deletes the file. In my case, I am doing an MSI upgrade which does not do anything to this file. When I compared the installstate file from 2.0 and 4.0 (both installed manually), I could see a huge difference in the XML syntax, schema and contents, the reason, I am getting serialization error. Now I need to know why AppName.installstate is not getting overwritten when upgraded. Doing lot of google, but landing nowhere. Looked at MSI install log, but no useful information.

Answer 1

Eureka !!!!

I found solution to my problem.

Root cause of the problem: MSI generates an XML file during installation (application_name.installstate), which stores information MSI uses during install, uninstall, rollback. The format of this XML file is completely different between .NET 2.0 and .NET 4.0 i.e. MSI developed using VS2005 and VS2010. Because 4.0 frmaework is not able to understand the file generated by Old Framework version (2.0), we are getting the error saying “Not able to serialize the Type of the Installstate file”. Though there is no documentation available online for this, there is this discussion I found > http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winformssetup/thread/bedbb8bd-dad5-4bcb-a87a-ac69386669b4/

Solution I tried (I would call it work-around): During installation of the New version, I am explicitly replacing the old XML file with the new format (4.0). i.e I included application_Name.installstate file (generated by new version) in my package, so it overwrote the old file while upgrade. MSI got installed without any error and is running successfully.

Reply here if anybody needs detail on both problem and solution.

Answer 2

This error message has nothing to do with the installer per the 1001 error message. The problem is fully inside your service.

Your service's OnStart method should be doing nothing but spinning up a background process and returning success start to the service control manager as quickly as possible. There shouldn't be any long running code in that critical path as the SCM will only wait so long before assuming there was an error starting the service.

Refactor your service to run the job on another thread and the install will successfully install. From there you can focus on the real problem of what's going on in your DeSerialization process.