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visual-studio-2013tfsdevenvtfs-2015vdproj

Visual Studio 2013 and TFS Build 2015: Devenv.exe unable to produce MSI file

We are in the process of upgrading our TFS 2013 server to TFS 2015. In that regard I have run into an issue when trying to perform an application build on a build agent with the new version, using our XAML template build script (which was created in TFS 2013).

Most of our solutions use the above-mentioned template when we build them. The solutions (sadly, still) use setup projects (.vdproj) to generate an MSI package for the application. To build the setup project, and produce an MSI, for a given application; we call the devenv.exe (in our case, it points to Visual Studio 2013) in our template build script:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe /Build "Release|Any CPU" "d:\<path_to_solution>\solution.sln" /Out c:\temp\out.log

However, on our new build agent no MSI is produced, and calling devenv.exe yields neither any output, nor any error messages. If I try to call devenv.com, however, it starts building, but still no MSI is being produced.

When things start to build using devenv.com It seems like it is completely disregarding the setup project (I have checked the build configurations, and the setup project is checked for build on the "Release|Any CPU" configuration).

I have looked at build logs, build process activity logs, and I have also tried to perform the steps manually on the build agent, but I haven't been able to find anything that could point me in the direction as to what might be causing the issue.

Does anyone have an idea what could be the reason for this? Could it be an issue with TFS Build 2015? The only difference between the old setup, and the new - as far as I can tell - is the following:

  1. VS 2013 was installed on C: rather than D: on the new build agent, i.e. the path to devenv would be different, but that should not matter as long as the build script is looking in the right place, and finds it...
  2. We use a different drop location than what we used for the old setup

Appreciate any help and suggestions I can get.

Solution

  • Problem solved, and everything is now building successfully. I did not do a good enough job of looking at the diff between the setup we had on the build agent we used for TFS Build 2013 vs. the one we set up for TFS Build 2015.

    Firstly, to be able to build setup projects in VS 2013, one needs to install the Visual Studio 2013 Installer Projects extension on the build agent.

    However, there are some bugs with this extension that often causes building setup projects to yield the following error message: "An error occurred while validating. HRESULT = '8000000A'". This error can be fixed by modifying the registry, as described in this SO post.

    Building the setup projects using devenv.exe, however, still doesn't work. I have not been able to figure out why, yet.