安装后，目标服务器网站bin文件夹中的所有DLL具有与Web安装程序MSI创建日期相同的时间戳记

Question

When the web setup project is built on Windows XP + VS.NET 2010, after installation the time stamp of third party referenced DLLs / referenced class library DLLs are preserved in the target server's web site bin folder.

I moved this solution to TFS 2010 + Windows 7 + VS.NET 2010 (did some changes to .sln / .vbproj files) and built the solution. Now when this web setup project is installed on target server, the time stamp of third party referenced DLLs / referenced class library DLLs are not preserved in the target server's web site bin folder, instead all DLLs have same time stamp as web setup project created date. Also, it seems that web setup project is not taking third party referenced DLLs / referenced class library DLLs from bin folder of web site. Additional note: Web setup project says that Precompiled Web Outputs from “XXX Web Deploy Project”.

Any suggestion what can cause this issue?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I'm not sure what caused the behavior change, but the new time stamps are the correct ones.

When generating a setup package, the build process should use copies of the files you included in it. These copies are created when you build your package, so they should have the same time stamp as the package.

For regular installers, the time stamps are the installation time because this is when the new copies are created on the target machine.

As a side note, you should never rely on time stamps for installation files. There are too many copy operations performed to keep track of what times are used.