Vault client causing problems with Visual Studio builds

[InsanelyOne]

Let me preface that the most obvious solution to my problem is probably to upgrade to a newer version of Vault but I wanted to run this by anyone that might be interested. I'm running Visual Studio 2008 on a Windows 7 (build 7100) VM. To date I've encountered no issues with developing in this environment.

I've got a relatively simple web application that I've developed and have successfully deployed on another server (windows server 2003). Everything was fine until I installed the Vault client (version 3.0.5). Prior to this Vault was not installed at all in this VM. Yes I know it's a very old version, but bear with me. Subsequent to installing the Vault client and before I even run the client, if I recompile my web application in Visual Studio, the resulting MSI installer is unusable. No matter what machine I attempt to run the installer on, I get this error (if I run the installer with logging):

Custom Action failed with code: '1615'

Luckily, since I'm running in a VM, I was able to revert to a snapshot taken before the installation of the Vault client. Once I did that, I can recompile my app and the installer works file. I've reproduced the problem 3 times in my VM. It's very strange. How could the installation of Vault client mess up MSI's created by Visual Studio. I would think they are totally unrelated.

Thoughts anyone? (I'm in the process of getting my boss to finally update us to Vault 5.... hopefully that will fix my issue).

[lbauer]

I did an Internet search and found that Windows Installer Error 1615 is "The SQL query syntax is invalid or unsupported."

Does your application use SQL Server?

I'm not sure how Vault client might be involved, but we do know that earlier versions of the client installation or uninstall registered -- or unregistered certain .dll's used by other programs, such as IE, SQL Server, Visual Studio, etc.

We haven't had reports of this specific problem before, but we haven't tested -- nor do we support -- Vault 3.x on Windows 7.

If by chance it does happen with Vault 5.0, at least we would be able to find the problem and fix it.

[InsanelyOne]

Thanks for the follow up. It could very well be the registering/unregistering of a DLL.

As for the 1615 error, MSI files are actually tiny databases. msiexec.exe uses SQL to parse the MSI file. That's explains the "SQL query syntax is invalid or unsupported" error. The MSI file is somehow corrupted.

I'm going to try one more time only this time doing a repair install of VS2008 after the install of Vault client.

Thanks again for the reply. I know I'm using an unsupported version of the Vault client but until I can get my boss to upgrade us, it's all I've got.

[lbauer]

OK, let us know how it goes.

[InsanelyOne]

Just a quick follow up. Reinstalling VS 2008 after installing the Vault client didn't fix the problem. However, I tried one more thing. Instead of installing Vault using the installer, I just copied the "C:\Program Files\SourceGear" folder from my working Win XP environment to my Win 7 VM. Vault seems to be working just fine and no issues with VS 2008.

[lbauer]

Thanks for the update. The Client installer makes changes to the registry to enable integration with Visual Studio. Since you copied the Vault Client files, are you using Visual Studio without integration?

[InsanelyOne]

Not using Visual Studio integration.

[lbauer]

Then this sounds like a good workaround for you.