Recently, as I was working on one of our installers, I had a very strange issue crop up. This particular installer is fairly complicated, but also fairly stable. It has many managed custom actions, and I was merely adding some functionality to it. I was testing the installer and ran into an 1154 error:
“There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A DLL required for this install to complete could not be run.“
That’s fine. This happens. It’s pretty common, actually.
- Check the names in the custom action declaration. Do they match the DLL and method name, including case?
- Are you trying to run a 64bit DLL using a 32bit installer?
- Are you running MakeSfxCA.exe correctly with the most recent version of the DLL and installer?
- Does the method you’re trying to call have the correct signature?
[CustomAction]Public static ActionResult MyCustomAction(Session session){….}
In this case, my problem action was, let’s say, HereIsMyCA. I checked through all of the above items several times. Most confusing was that other custom actions from the same DLL worked just fine. One might say I was getting a bit frustrated. Eventually, I changed the name of the action and method – ThisIsAwfulPleaseWork.
…and it did.
After some experimentation I discovered that the problem lay in the capitalization of the C# method. HereIsMyCA was breaking, but HereIsMyCa was fine. Most other methods with similar capitalization (several capitals in a row) worked fine. I’ve had one other method break. There is no rhyme or reason to it, but I hope that I save someone some hours with my discovery.
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