Creating an installer, error The Folder path '.' contains an invalid character

Question

I am trying to make an installer for a project I did not write, and I use the wizard to create the setup. Program Files Folder contains a favicon.ico, a custom dll, and Primary output from the project.

Whenever I build the installer and try to run it I get a, "The folder path '.' contains an invalid character." and the installer aborts. How can I fix this? What is going on?

Answer 1

Found the solution. At work when we install something and it asks for company name and user name we always put '.', well Visual Studio uses the company name for the setup projects as [Manufacturer]. IE it was trying to install to C:\\Program Folder(x86).\\ProjectName. To fix it I removed the [Manufacturer] from the folder path of ApplicationFolder.

Answer 2

I had the misfortune to have to track down this error. It turned out that VS2010(SP1) put \\r\\n in front of "Manufacturer" in the product section of the installer.vdproj. The name was entered in Properties section without any leading \\r\\n characters. VS2010 did this all on its own :-(( eg "Product" { "Name" = "8:Microsoft Visual Studio" .... "Manufacturer" = "8:\\r\\nMyManufacturerName" ..... "ARPCONTACT" = "8:\\r\\nMyManufacturerName" ... } Once I took out the \\r\\n by opening it in Notepad everything worked fine. This took a long time to track down. However I have come to expect this kind of shoddy product from Microsoft (and I am not even talking about WPF). These are giant killers of developer productivity and we developers are essentially acting as QA for Microsoft.