coapp-developers team mailing list archive

[Garrett Serack <garretts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Eric,

I saw your tweet--what kind of problems were you having?

I can give you a few hints:

use
   msiexec /lvx* logfile.txt /i [installer].msi and you will generate a huge-log file.

install voidtools.com "everything" for searching your whole hard disk. This will help you find a file called cbs.log ... I dunno where it is, I found it with everything. it's a really deep log file for component based servicing. (wipe it out before a new install)

between cbs.log and the logfile.txt files, it'll tell you everything that's going wrong... not that what it tells you is necessarily clear... but it's all there.

My issue on Friday turned out to be the order in which I signed things... I was signing the EXEs after I had created a manifest & hashes & cdf files ... which changed the hash. (do'h!)

My testpackagemaker source code should be readable enough to pick out the order in which I've done that.

OH!!!

And, if you uninistall a WinSxS package, and then recreate a new package with slightly different contents and don't change the version, it'll fail because the version you're trying to install differs from the one already installed (and the Master Control Program's recognizers haven't de-rezzed the previously installed one....hmmm..maybe that was just Tron. ) When WinSxS uninstalls something, the files aren't immediately removed--they're queued up for cleanup later (when your PC isn't busy) If you attempt to reinstall the same version, it checks if it's the same as the one you've just uninstalled.

I asked the WinSxS maintainer (Eugene) about the possibility of forcing a cleanup; he said he didn't know of any way to force the cleanup to happen. I found that if I found the folder in c:\windows\WinSXS and made sure that nothing was locked, I could force the permissions on the specific folder and delete it. I highly don't recommend this tho... I'm not sure that it's a smart idea.

G