SharpDevelop Community

Hi,

I've been trying to follow the steps Matt shows in his blog about creating a wix installer with SD 2.1. A very detailed article I might say. So I downloaded build 2283 and started of. After creating the setup project and trying to build it (still at the point where I need to fill in the product name and manufactorer). I'm getting a build error as is explained in the article. But reading the error I think something else is wrong:

The specified task executable location "/C:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\HP Software Update\install.htm\candle.exe" is invalid. (MSB6004) - C:\Program Files\SharpDevelop\2.1\bin\Tools\Wix\wix.targets:97,9

I've searched the net and I've tried to understand stuff that's going on in wix.targets but no luck. The mentioned location is a valid directory on my harddisk but candle.exe isn't installed there (as expected). How do I make SD look into the tools\wix directory so the build will find candle.exe?

Any thoughts?

Jeroen

Hi Jeroen,

I installed 2.1.0.2283 and it didn't seem to install a whole lot of WiX files. In fact it didn't install wix.targets on my machine for some reason. The installer for 2.1.0.2286 seems OK. Try that one and if you're having problems let me know.
 

Matt,

Uninstalled 2283 and installed 2286 but the error still shows up... :-(

Any idea where the directory is read from?

Jeroen

For those who are interested in the fix for this problem...

The TOOLPATH environment variable was set on Jeroen's machine. MSBuild takes all environment variables and turns them into properties which can be used during the build and by the MSBuild project file. This ToolPath value is used by the WiX project to work out where Candle.exe is. If we have an environment variable called TOOLPATH then this value overrides everything and we get an error since Candle.exe cannot be found. To fix the problem you can do one of two things:

1) Remove the TOOLPATH environment variable.

2) Edit the .wixproj file and remove the Condition check on the ToolPath element.

Change:

<ToolPath Condition=" '$(ToolPath)' == '' ">$(WixToolPath)</ToolPath>

I will be updating SharpDevelop so this condition check is removed when new WiX projects are created.