Issue with setup that check whether Visual Studio 2022 C# is installed.

[hugoqribeiro]

Question

We've got this Wix project that uses a launch condition to check whether VS 2022 is installed.

<Wix ...>
    <Package ...>
        <vs:FindVisualStudio />
        <PropertyRef Id="VS2022_EXTENSIONS_DIR" />
        <PropertyRef Id="VS2022_IDE_VCSHARP_PROJECTSYSTEM_INSTALLED" />
        (...)
        <Launch
            Condition="Installed OR VS2022_IDE_VCSHARP_PROJECTSYSTEM_INSTALLED"
            Message="This application requires Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 and the C# project system. Please install this Visual Studio component and run this installer again." />
        (...)
    </Package>
</Wix

This has been working perfectly for ages. Recently, we started having machines that wouldn't instance/upgrade the msi because the launch condition is not met (like if VS 2022 is not installed, which it is).

On one of these machines, the setup log includes the following messages:

Action start 14:45:30: Wix4VSFindInstances_X64.
DEBUG: Error 2769:  Custom Action Wix4VSFindInstances_X64 did not close 1 MSIHANDLEs.
The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2769. The arguments are: Wix4VSFindInstances_X64, 1, 
Action ended 14:45:31: Wix4VSFindInstances_X64. Return value 1.

Both VS2022_IDE_VCSHARP_PROJECTSYSTEM_INSTALLED and VS2022_EXTENSIONS_DIR are not being evaluated correctly (we tried removing the launch condition but the problem that is that things are installed in wrong places because VS2022_EXTENSIONS_DIR is not defined.

Any idea what could cause something like this or what else we could do to diagnose why this happens only on certain machines?

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[robmen]

That sounds like there is a problem in the Wix4VSFindInstances code. Since you have a repo, you might drop a debugger on the CustomAction and see if you can capture what is failing. It might be a crash as there should be logging for any normal error.