By Fenton Webb
Recently, our AppStore team ran into a problem with the AppStore build process by which a developer had sent us an MSM Merge Module for merging into our AppStore MSI. The problem was that when the installer ran, this error appeared:
"Error 1001. InstallUtilLib.dll: CorBindToRuntimeHost (hr=0x80070003): The
system cannot find the path specified."
The problem appears to be that MSM’s created with Visual Studio only like to be merged with MSI’s that are also built with Visual Studio. So even if you merge a Visual Studio MSM with a verifiably decent MSI tool like InstallSheild or Wise project it will still fail.
I worked out a pretty simple solution, which took me quite a bit of effort to master Basically, I created my own merge module MSM which contained the missing MSI components that the Visual Studio MSM was looking for, it’s called VisualStudioCompatibility.msm.
If you merge the VisualStudioCompatibility.msm into your non VS MSI before merging your VS MSM, it should work fine.
By the way, feel free to use the VisualStudioCompatibility.msm as you wish, but at your own risk.