Thursday, August 23, 2012

Installshield LE and Visual Studio 2012 Release

Microsoft has formally released Visual Studio 2012, and it is time to go through some project migrations from the RC(Release Candidate) version of Visual Studio 2012.

It seems to me that transitioning from pre-release software to release version is never trouble-free. Although this time around the transitions are actually much smoother than before, there bound to be some glitches here and there still.

For me, one of the things that was broken was a Installshield LE project. Microsoft has killed off their own setup projects, so Installshield LE is the only choice for a free setup. I created an Installshield LE project with the RC version of Visual Studio 2012. After upgrading to the release version, the project could no longer build because InstallShield could no longer find a merge module for "Microsoft_VC110_CRT_x86....".

The fix turned out to be quite straightforward: First you may need to fix Installshield LE from the control panel. Then in Visual Studio, expand the Installshield project in the "Solution Explorer", expand "2. Specify Application Data", and then select "Redistributables". Deselect the old "Visual C++ 11.0 CRT (x86)" at the bottom of the list that has a yellow exclamation mark next to it. It will disappear instantly. Then select the new "Visual C++ 11.0 CRT (x86)" higher up in the list.

Problem solved.