Build Problems With a Very Large Visual Studio Deployment Project
So I have been tackling a build problem with some humongous deployment builds in Visual Studio. In reality, VS Deployment Projects are not ideal for even slightly sophisticated MSI installers; but we’ve gone far enough down this path that we can’t make the switch at the moment. So please choose something with more control like the Microsoft-sponsored open-source project WiX or a well-established, paid product like InstallShield.
So the error I kept getting was "Not enough storage is available to complete this operation" and it would list some file (not the same every time). It appears the error means the build process ran out of virtual memory or something. So I found something interesting about default limit of 2 GB for any Windows process and how to raise that limit. That process is discussed in this post: http://murrayon.net/2007/12/building-monster-vs-2005-or-2008.html
Well, it has worked on one guy’s laptop this whole time and it only worked for about 2 days on my machine (then it started getting an error that said "Unrecoverable build error" and was accompanied with a "Send Error Report" dialog). I also tried the fix on like 3 other machines without any success at all (in fact many of the machines become highly unstable with the 3GB Windows boot switch). So for 6 months, I couldn’t figure out why it would work on that one machine and none of the others. Well, just recently that guy’s laptop joined the domain and started using a domain user account (I have no clue why he wasn’t from the beginning, but I digress). His machine didn’t become unstable, but it did quit building our monster deployment build. We thought we were up a creek with no box to build the MSI installer and a deadline fast approaching. We got it working on his laptop by going back to a local user account.
Well, that got me thinking about how we could get another PC to be able to do the darn build. I tried the build on my PC with just a local user account, but that didn’t work because I don’t currently have the other fix named above. So I created a virtual machine (in case things got unstable again) and didn’t add it to the domain, just to be safe. I did the fix named above, and am now able to successfully build this MSI install consistently under a local user account without getting the "Not enough storage is available" error message. The details of this adventure are discussed in this post: http://murrayon.net/2007/12/build-error-when-building-very-large-vs.html
Maybe in a few months we’ll move this installer build process to WiX and avoid the inflexibility we are running into with Visual Studio Deployment Projects.
