Can InstallShield LE 2013 be fixed after installing Visual Studio 2015?

Question

Our group has been running InstallShield 2013 LE for quite a while now with no issues. We use it solely for creating setup projects for Windows Services.

Last week several of us in our group installed Visual Studio 2015. Shortly thereafter, we started getting complaints from the testers that our setup projects were no longer working. The projects build just fine, but when installing we get the following error: “Error 1001”. The event logs are equally unhelpful, only stating “The description for Event ID 11001 from source MsiInstaller cannot be found.” and “Installation success or error status: 1603.”

A coworker and I both spent about a day trying various things to get it to work: from uninstalling Visual Studio 2015, to reinstalling Visual Studio 2013, to uninstalling and reinstalling InstallShield LE 2013.

My coworker found that if she unchecked the Installer Class checkbox on the COM & .NET Settings tab on the Properties window of the service’s Primary Output file then the setup.exe runs to completion with no problems (though the application is then not registered as a service on the system).

I have also discovered that if I uninstall the .NET 4.6 framework, the setup projects work fine once again.

I was hoping that InstallShield LE 2015 would be available but every time I check it only says “Coming Soon”. We have recommended to all of our developers to stop using Visual Studio 2015 and uninstall the .NET 4.6 framework until the InstallShield issues are resolved.

Does anyone have a way to "get around" this issue and be able to install services with the 4.6 framework?

Answer 1

.net 4.6 and installshield has compatibility issues. Will generate an error 1001 when installing components with .net installer class set to true. This affects installshield 2014/2015 and potentially there is a service pack that fixes this issue.