MSBuild No outputs for project [x] were provided, but the installation project...

[fluxmunki]

I have an InstallShield 2010 project with Visual Studio integration. The installer builds fine within VS IDE, but when I try to build it with MSBuild it fails with the following message:

No outputs for project "Infragistics.CompositeUI.Winforms" were provided, but the installation project references "Infragistics.CompositeUI.Winforms.Primary output".

This same message is repeated for several assemblies.

I've seen some forum posts about this, but it looks like a slightly different issue, and it refers to old versions of Installshield so I assume this has been fixed. I've checked the project dependencies and build order in VS and the installer is dependent on them all and is build last.

Any ideas?

[MichaelU]

If you check this project output group, does it contain any files? If not, the MSBuild support will not necessarily be able to differentiate between the empty group and one that wasn't provided, so you should consider removing the reference. If it does have files, you can try logging the project outputs by adding a line like this to your InstallShield.targets file ([ProgramFilesFolder]MSBuild\...), and perhaps walk it earlier until you can find the source of the problem.

[fluxmunki]

The output was being created for this project. I looked at the logged project outputs and noticed that the ones causing problems were all those that had been abreviated in the .isproj file. I tried changing these in the .isproj file to the full project name and it seems to have fixed the problem.

Infragistics.CompositeUI.W

changed to:

Infragistics.CompositeUI.WinForms

It is worth pointing out that this is just a workaround and really the isproj file should be created with project references that actually work with MSBuild. I'm sort of surprised that I've not seen other people with the same issue.

[MichaelU]

Agreed, I'm surprised the ProjectReference item group would be filled in incorrectly. Saving the file that way definitely sounds like buggy behavior.

[pcj206]

MichaelU wrote:
Agreed, I'm surprised the ProjectReference item group would be filled in incorrectly. Saving the file that way definitely sounds like buggy behavior.

We have been struggling with this error as well. We've found that the names get truncated in isproj for any project name that is longer than 32 characters (including the file extension).

The workaround suggested does get us past the build errors, however at runtime the installer now errors out with the following message:

The specified File key ('x') not found in the file table.

It seems as if the truncated name might still be used somewhere other than the isproj file, but I've not had any luck fixing it. Any help is appreciated.

[Marwan]

Which version of Visual Studio and MSBuild are you using?

[pcj206]

We're using Visual Studio 2008 Professional and MSBuild Tools Version 3.5. We also are using InstallShield 2010 sp1.

Also, we've noticed the following output after making the suggested fix to isproj when viewing a detailed build log. This seems related so we are investigating further.

The referenced project group "(x).Localized resources" is empty.

Note, everything works fine on this project when run in the IDE and these errors only occur when running MSBuild from command line.

Thanks!

[adam_driscoll]

This issue is pretty sticky. I'm glad I found this post because it definetely fixed my problem. The issue is that every time I edit the ISProj in the designer I have to open it in a text editor to re-fix all the references. It's fine for us because we only have about 10 projects but I would imagine this could be pretty annoying with more.

I'm using Visual Studio 2010 Premium with InstallShield 2010 Limited Edition.

[stephen_mccullo]

Thanks to this thread I was able to resolve about 120 errors from my TFS \ InstallShield 2011 Standalone Build configuration.

I was able to determine that to fix this permanently I would have to increase the size of the ISPathVariable column of the ISPathVariable table.

Here are the steps I took to fix this problem once-and-for-all:

1) Check-out your ISPROJ project from TFS then close the solution
2) Open the .ism file (located in the same folder as the .isproj file) in Notepad
3) Using the serach to to locate the table definition for ISPathVariable
4) Note that the column definition is defined by default as
ISPathVariable
Change the def value to a larger number such as "s64"
5) Re-open the solution in Visual Studio and open the "Direct Editor" view of your Installer project
6) Correct all of the project names in the following columns of the following tables (this is a one-time action after increasing the ISPathVariable column length):
Column ISPathVariable; Table ISPathVariable
Column ISBuildSourcePath; Table File
7) Save and check-in your project.

Of course a larger default size of s64 would be far more reasonable then s32, but at least this can be fixed.

Stephen