Question

I have an application that runs perfectly when I run it from Visual Studio. But once I hit “Publish” and try to launch “setup.exe”, I get an error message:

This application could not be started. Do you want to view information about this issue?

Clicking on yes leads me here. I have no idea what “SHIM” is and it’s definitely not part of the code.

The error is the same if I publish to a network share or to my local drive. Once installed, the application shows up in “Programs and Features” and can be uninstalled but a Start Menu entry is not added. It’s as if the error occurs during the installation.

I tried chancing the prerequisites (and target framework) between 3.5 and 4, as well as Windows Installer 3.1 vs 4.5 – no dice.

While it is currently targetting 3.5, it was originally created as a 4.03 app. I did change the target framework a couple times and going back to 4.03 doesn’t fix it. I’m pretty sure this issue appeared as a result of retargetting.

Can anyone provide clues where to look?

Answer 1

Take a Look at configuration files if you have any app.config or web.config.

If you didn’t find any tag regarding the target framework, Do a File Search on you solution folder and if you find something in .csproj or .sln files, change it to the correct one.