Windows application deployment failed

William Snell

18y4.5k

I set up a project and a windows installer to go with it, and added a shortcut to the User's Program Menu folder via the installer. This all worked great on my computer. Then I tried it on another machine, and received the following error:

"This installation package could not be opened. Verify that the package exits and that u can access it, or contact the application vendor to verity
that this is a valid Windows Installer package."

I emailed the .msi file (renamed the extension to bypass email restrictions) and renamed it again to .msi on the target computer. I used the exact same .msi file to install on my computer. I tried this on both a Vista and XP machine, and received the same error both times. This kind of thing is really aggravating to me, as it is almost inevitable that a project, either ASP.NET or Windows Application, will end up working on the development machine, and completely die anywhere else. Anyway, useless complaining aside, I spent quite a bit of time looking for the answer online, and saw MANY posts where people had this issue, but nearly all of them were using third party software (Office, Java products, etc.) and weren't addressing developer issues, but currupted Windows Installer issues. Can anyone help?

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William Snell18y ago
Accepted answer
OK, compression worked fine, too, so here's the skinny for anyone else coming after with the same problem.

Emailing the application with extension renamed - failed.

Emailing the application in a zipped file - worked!

Transporting on a flash drive - worked!!!

It seems that, as I surmised in a previous post, that the encoding used in the email attachments messed something up. I assume (perilous as it is) that any portable media should work, such as flash drives (tested), external hard drives, CD/DVD disks, etc., as well as compressed file transport via email.
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Ryan Alford18y ago
don't forget, some emailing systems will remove the .exe or .msi file from a .zip(maybe even .rar) if it suspects that it's a virus.

I use FTP to update an application that I wrote for my parents. My mom clicks a button, it checks for an update, FTPs from my PC to her PC, then installs it.
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William Snell18y ago
That worked great. Thanks a lot. Do you know how to distribute an application like this over the Internet? Email or HTTP? I'm wondering why it gets corrupted. I read that, in some instances, compressing the file might create a problem, but I didn't do that. Just renaming, emailing and renaming again shouldn't ruin it. It has to be something with the encoding the email uses.
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Ryan Alford18y ago
I get this error message sometimes when copying an msi file across a network and the copy fails. I normally just copy it again and it works.

how about trying to put the .msi file on a flash drive and moving it to the other PC instead of changing the file extension?
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