wix - Are applications dependent on the environment where it was compiled?

Question

We are having a System.BadImageFormatException in our MSI installers. I have already read about the target frameworks, but we already checked and it's targeting the correct framework (.NET Framework 4.5 same with our QA machines).

We have exactly the same source codes, but the results of the msi installer compiled by our 'build team' fails, but the msi installer compiled by us 'dev' works. Question is, does the environment where an application was built and compiled affects the output (example: msi installers)?

Answer 1

There are basically two reasons for this error:

1. A cross-architecture call from 32-bit code to 64-bit (or vice versa). Different architectures require different MSI setups Heath Stewarts blog and so everything in a 32-bit setup (especially managed custom action code) should be explicitly 32-bit and explicitly 64-bit in a 64-bit install. For example, when an x64 system encounters AnyCpu code it might load the X64 runtime, and then a reference to a 32-bit assembly will fail and get this error.

2. A .NET framework runtime attempt to load the "wrong" framework. The NET 4 runtime is somewhat backwards compatible, so you are most likely to get this error when code expecting the NET 2 runtime encounters a NET 4 engine. The devil is in the details here, but again, this is much like the architecture issue. If anything loads the NET 2 runtime and the calling sequence tries to call a NET 4 assembly to run in the 2.0 FW it will fail with this message.

Having said that, it's not clear exactly how you are calling the managed code, whether through DTF or something else (such as the Visual Studio InstallUtilLib mechanism). And finally the machine you build on makes no difference to the eventual runtime environment. It's no different from a code file which will work on one machine but fail on another because (for example) it can't find the C++ runtime. The issue isn't the build machine, it's the environment of the target machine.