Source Safe seems to "break" one of our .ism files, anyone seen this?

[ploskinj]

Just curious if anyone else has run into this one, Google turned up nothing.

We just started seeing this with one of our .ism files. If we copy and paste directly from each other's machines it works perfectly, but when we check it into Source Safe and check it out on another machine it fails with the following error message:

"InstallShield can not open (Path) Please contact Macrovision technical support for more information."

The only thing we can figure, maybe Source Safe is stripping some piece of meta-data that Install Shield needs.

I just wanted to see if anyone else has seen this before we actually contact Macrovision support.

Thanks!

[#2]

Just as a very quick sanity check, are you saving this project in XML format? You can verify this by going to General Information -> Project Properties -> Project File Format.

[ploskinj]

Project file format is "Binary", is that something that could cause problems like this?

Thanks!

[#4]

Yes 🙂

Try setting it to XML and go from there.

[ploskinj]

That fixed it, thank you.

Is there something in the documentation I missed?

[alegerlotz]

ploskinj wrote:
That fixed it, thank you.

Is there something in the documentation I missed?

Its not an InstallShield problem, its a VSS problem...

I've seen this before with some custom ODBC drivers and some other binaries in our VSS system at the time.

Its now about 8 years ago, so its a little foggy for me, but it had to do with VSS trying to do some sort of substitution for tags it was looking for. We had enabled a feature that was doing headers in the files and including comments in them, I think. As I recall, the solution was to put files of certain types on an exclude list and all was well.

As you've seen, changing the format of the .ism to xml has fixed your problem, but you might want to look around at your DBs VSS settings to see if you can turn off whatever feature corrupted your .ism files in binary form. It could come up again with other binary files when you least expect it.

Update:

I think that it was "Keyword Expansion" that was the culprit in our case... http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;155888 It found what it thought was one of its keywords and started inserting things.

[#7]

I believe we briefly discuss the possiblity of what algerlotz is discussing in our documentation regarding the project types, but not with the level of detail his explination provides.

I know we added the feature to save in XML format specifically for Source Control issues.