C# Winforms App - Not a valid win32 application

Question

I am receiving this error - Not a valid Win32 Application. The program runs fine on a Vista PC. It is deployed using the ClickOnce bootstrapper. ]

I read

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsnetsetup/archive/2012/10/16/setup-exe-is-not-a-valid-win32-application.aspx

here that VS2012 ClickOnce does not support XP, but this article is focused on C++, not C#. I can't see anything similar for C#.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Answer 1

As your source states:

Clickonce bootstrapper engine (setup.exe) that was shipped with Visual Studio 2012 is NOT compatible with any OS below Windows Vista. So, the above error message is expected and by design. The reason for this behavior is because the bootstrapper is compiled using the VC compiler and the Dev11 VC compiler does not support Windows XP.

That applies to any application compiled with VS2012, regardless of language, because it's the bootstrapper (install program) that's failing, not the application.

So your application can run on the XP box, but not the Clickonce installer.