MSI Installer for 64bit Windows Platform(Visual Studio)

Question

I have a COM component which I wish to deploy in a 64bit environment. There are multiple applications using this COM component. Some of these applications are 32-bit and others are 64-bit. So while creating an installer, I which to bundle both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of my COM dll. In my first attempt, while building the installer project, I get a lot of warnings:

Ex. WARNING: Two or more objects have the same target location ('[payload_ul]\\msvcp90.dll')

The warnings above are to do with merge modules. I have checked, but no multiple merge modules are present.

Also while the projects compiles successfully though with the warnings, while testing I found that the 64 bit module had failed to register.

The MSI was marked for x64 platform.

Can anyone provide pointers for the correct way to do this?

Answer 1

MSI doesn't support mixed x86 and x64 installers (check out this blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/heaths/archive/2008/01/15/different-packages-are-required-for-different-processor-architectures.aspx ). There are ways to "workaround" it, but eventually you will be bitten one way or another.