Installshield Limited Edition refuses to add Extended WPF Toolkit assemblies

Question

I have had the pleasure of using ISLE and its now got to the point where I have to post a question on SO. Ohh the headache.

I have tried added the Extended WPF Tookit via nuget and manually to my application but with no luck getting ISLE to include these assemblies when it builds the installer. I have done a dependency scan in ISLE and in both scenario the dependencies are present.

I am using a TeamCity (v8.1.1) build server to automate the build. Everything works fine except that it will not include the above mentioned assemblies in the package.

How do I solve this problem?

Update #1

With some more research it seems that ISLE on the dev. box picked up a wrong version of log4net.dll while the build server found the correct version.

Resolution - Cleared all log4net.dll found in the "%temp%\\Temporary asp.net files" folder.

Answer 1

You solve the problem by turning off dependency scanning and take responsibility for knowing what your applications needs to run and what the best way for deploying it. Dynamic installation authoring has never fully worked and it never will. When you take into consideration all the different kinds of apps and the way they take their dependencies it becomes obvious.

The easy button is an illusion.

Answer 2

I am unaware of why ISLE has these inconsistency and obvious logic problems however I have resolved my issue, albeit the solution is shaky.

Issue #1

Firstly I encountered a XamlParseException due to a TypedInitializationException. An assembly could not be loaded and that assembly was noted in the Exception which turned out to be log4net. The log4net assembly was in the folder however it was the wrong version.

Somehow ISLE found an older version of this assembly in the "%temp%\\ASP.NET Temporary files" folder and used that in the package. Clear all these files and give ISLE no choice but to use the assembly you have provided. NOTE: Don't get gungho and delete the culprit assembly if found in the folder of one or more of your installed applications - it just might stop working .

Issue #2

I realized that not only were the Extended WPF Toolkit but the output of a dependent console application was missing from the install directory.

You would expect ISLE to find all dependencies however it doesn't .

Based on the advice provided by @@Christopher Painter I added the primary output of the console application dependency manually. I expected this to solve the console dependency issue however it turned out to solve both.

Now does ISLE break internally if the one of the dependencies is unavailable, locked, or some exception occurred while adding to the output causing it to stop at that point and not add any more dependencies. Who knows, but I am sure there are some flaws within ISLE Microsoft if you are going to ship a 3rd party and only a 3rd party installer ensure that it works properly first .

Update #1

Running the build a second time on the TeamCity server resulted in the Extended WPF Toolkit not being added again. So it seems again the ISLE installer is really shaky.

Issue #3

Another option to solve the missing Extended WPF Toolkit assemblies would have been to add then explicitly as dependencies. ISLE however adds a explicit rather than relative path location to these files meaning that you need to recreate the folder structure on your build server (not good).

If anyone has a better solution I would love to hear it. This request also goes out to Flexera Software and hopefully the answer is not to upgrade to the PRO version or pay for support.