Blair,
While I never knew you were doing it at the time, thank you soo much for your efforts on this sneakly little critter of a bug. DTF has a special place in my heart ( I'm sure you saw all my blog posts over the years evangelizing the need for managed code custom actions ) and your efforts probably took DTF's reliability from 3 9's to 4 9's. That is an accomplishment. FWIW, I recall reporting a bug a few years back where an InstallUtil custom action was changing the environment and then DTF would break because sfca couldn't launch RunDll. It was tricky because the InstallUtil CA came from a merge module and depending on how it got sequenced the bug would sometimes happen and sometimes not. I worked with Jason on that one and he made a fix. That probably took us from 2 9's to 3 9's but your bug above is an even bigger deal. Good job! Chris ---------------------------------------- From: "Blair" <os...@live.com> Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2012 8:56 PM To: chr...@iswix.com, "General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset." <wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net>, "Neil Sleightholm" <n...@x2systems.com> Subject: RE: [WiX-users] Two Wierd Installer Problems - DTF and QuietExec Except for that one repeatable machine, the problem always "went away" upon retry (the same behavior you all have reported). That one machine was able to repro more than once in a row, and after about four days I even got it to repro in the debugger. That's when I finally discovered exactly what was happening, and then I was able to stage a repro at will. I submitted the fix to WiX, and a couple of weeks later walked another team through their attempts to verify the fix. Blair -----Original Message----- From: Christopher Painter [mailto:chr...@iswix.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2012 11:57 AM To: Neil Sleightholm; General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset. Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Two Wierd Installer Problems - DTF and QuietExec I'm going to be creating a trojan installer that serves as a health check and deploying it daily to 2200 machines. I'll be able to stress test the fix made in 3.6 and see what happen.s ---------------------------------------- From: "Neil Sleightholm" <n...@x2systems.com> Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2012 1:06 PM To: "General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset." <wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net>, "chr...@iswix.com" <chr...@iswix.com> Subject: RE: [WiX-users] Two Wierd Installer Problems - DTF and QuietExec As Chris said excellent information. Mine problem was with 3.5 and this ties in with what I was seeing; on my VMs running on an i7 host I never saw the problem but the tester often got it on his lower powered host. He need move to a VM on an ESX host and the problem largely went away. I think I will try the newer SfxCA.dll (or I might just go for 3.6). Thanks Neil -----Original Message----- From: Blair [mailto:os...@live.com] Sent: 25 January 2012 18:14 To: 'General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset.'; chr...@iswix.com Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Two Wierd Installer Problems - DTF and QuietExec Are these problems in 3.5 or 3.6? Last year I discovered a defect in DTF wherein a race condition upon completion of a DTF custom action call would cause a failure return to Windows Installer, even when the managed code custom action itself returned success. That was fixed in 3.6, but the bug remains in 3.5. The race condition is in the native wrapper code. It tends to manifest only when there is a heavy load (either CPU or disk) in the machine at the moment that the custom action is completing, and thus was very difficult to reproduce (I was fortunate enough to have exactly one box that reproduced it with any (but still uncertain) regularity, out of dozens of other boxes that would never reproduce it). You can take the SfxCA.dll files from recent builds of 3.6 and use them with 3.5's RTM build to get that race condition fix and an unrelated memory leak fix. I don't remember the bug numbers, but I do remember the investigation and fix of the race condition. I don't know what would cause the QuietExec issue, however. -Blair ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
