com - Cannot register DLL using WiX

Question

I am trying to register a DLL using WiX. Now I know and understand that I should use heat and get it to pull the registry information for me, but heat seems to fail with the following error message: heat.exe : warning HEAT5150 : Could not harvest data from a file that was expected to be a SelfReg DLL: C:UserssebDesktopDevelopmentaddin.dll. If this file does not support SelfReg you can ignore this warning. Otherwise, this error detail may be helpful to diagnose the failure: Unable to load file: C:UserssebDesktopDevelopmentaddin.dll, error: 193

I've looked around and found this post which explains a bit more in detail about registering DLLs but I would like to avoid the self registration route if possible. I also see mention of manually registering the DLLs further down below, but I'm not too well versed with the registry or COM objects that well to know where I could even get the CLSID, ProgId, and any other information that has been mentioned.

If anyone can point me in the right direction or explain to me what I need to do to run the DLL through heat it would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I know this is old but I wanted to add an answer here - the reason this occurs is because the dll you are trying to register is 64 bit dll - and Heat.exe is 32 bit so it cannot load the dll in its address space. Anyway, just point to a 32 bit version of the dll to create the wxs file and you should not receive that error.