Wix 5 bootstrapper with WinForms?

[michaelgburton]

I've created a Windows Forms project that I want to use as the BA for my install bundle so that I can populate an INI file with user-supplied application settings during the install process. The bundle builds, but when I try to run the installer I see both the installer EXE and the BA EXE show up briefly, and then terminate. It's not clear to me why this is happening, but the log file has the following message, and I wonder if I'm not doing some "connecting" action correctly in the startup of my BA, or if the BA is required to use WPF, or what's happening. I've looked at both TestBA and Richard Martin's tutorial project, but I can't seem to find the source of my issue.

Error 0x80070080: Failed to wait for bootstrapper application to connect to pipe.

[michaelgburton]

Ok, so the problem isn't with WinForms but with DLLs...you have to manually include the payload DLLs for the bootstrapper application. It now errors out with a COMInteropException when trying to talk to MBANative.

[michaelgburton]

I got to the above conclusion using EventViewer, for anyone wondering.

[michaelgburton]

I got my installer working by switching to an SDK-style project and publishing to a folder, where I discovered that the project creates both an EXE and a DLL, both of which are necessary to load the bootstrapper. I've been using Engine.Log to get extra information about what's happening inside my bootstrapper, as it doesn't seem to load into the debugger correctly.

A lot of this feels a bit like hedge magic at the moment, with unexpected things derailing the process at every turn. I may try to build a much simpler tutorial for the next poor soul down the road who tries to make this work; while I appreciate the two I've been following, they obscure quite a lot of details behind complex (though admittedly elegant) component designs at the moment.