Cool MSI custom action debugging tool

re: Cool MSI custom action debugging tool

Steven Bone — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 04:44:00 GMT

Aaron - Kudos to you and Jungwook for sharing this with the community.

Continuing the discussion from the other thread on debugging... To hit the rollback case for debugging you can return an ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE from another deferred CA (added after the deferred CA you want to debug, of course). All of my CA DLL's have an entry point MsiCauseError() for this purpose.

The QA people tend to frown when they grab a work in progress and see the "Do you want me to cause an error?" dialog. I haven't gotten the "Installation rollback after dialog selection" bug report yet, but if any of them happen to be reading this, I'm sure I'll see one assigned to me in the morning :)

re: Cool MSI custom action debugging tool

tomtrias — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 01:18:19 GMT

Aaron,

I second Steven's praise. However, while using catest to work on WiX v. 3's custom actions, I was wondering if it is possible within the catest.ini to have hooks for multiple actions of the same type (e.g. Immediate); I figured that catest could route to the correct action by the CustomAction.Action field. Here's my CustomAction table, to illustrate my point:

SchedSecureObjects 1 WixCA SchedSecureObjects

SchedSecureObjectsRollback 1 WixCA SchedSecureObjectsRollback

ExecSecureObjects 3073 WixCA ExecSecureObjects

ExecSecureObjectsRollback 3329 WixCA ExecSecureObjectsRollback

SchedServiceConfig 1 WixCA SchedServiceConfig

ExecServiceConfig 3073 WixCA ExecServiceConfig

RollbackServiceConfig 3329 WixCA RollbackServiceConfig

I have no problems setting catest up for one of each type, but what would I do in the INI in order to debug both SchedSecureObjects and SchedSecureObjectsRollback?

If catest doesn't handle this situation, is it possible to get source so that I can modify it to do so? Otherwise, I'm stuck reverse-engineering it (or writing a dll with yet another layer of indirection... hmm... that would probably work).

Thanks,

Tom

re: Cool MSI custom action debugging tool

astebner — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:45:33 GMT

Hi Tomtrias - I will follow up with the creator of this CATest tool to see if it is possible to send you source code.

re: Cool MSI custom action debugging tool

mendezam — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:41:01 GMT

The is an easier way to debug the custom actions. Simply enter the following in the custom dll:

#if DEBUG

Debugger.Launch();

#endif

Then attach to the VS instance that has the code.