Christopher Painter wrote: I was trying to save you months of countless frustration by passing on a tidbit of wisdom based on my 17 years of setup development. If one thinks about such things as the component rules, upgrade servicing, and what it means to reflect C++, VB, .NET with early and late binding references and all the complexity involved it quickly becomes obvious that the only trust worthy dependency scanner is the one sitting at the keyboard researching, designing, constructing and testing the changes. Leaving it to build time magic rarely ends well. Tools vendors add these features because some developers demand them. Attempt to use these features at your own risk. if this is the case, really you have to ask what exactly is the point of ISLE. As far as I saw it dependency scanner was the only advantage it had. Might as well just use something like WIX if I'm going to have to do all the work anyway which doesn't have any of the limitations put on us by ISLE ... View more

Sorry Chris, didn't mean to offend. was just a bit confused by the mention of iswix in your sig. Also been a bit tidied up of late so haven't had the time to even think about this for a while Just want to clarify what you are saying I'm not an install developer so a little of this terminology is a bit lost on me Basically, the dependency scanning is un-reliable, therefore don't use it. Add dependencies to the deployment manually instead. If this is what you meant, Thanks but that exactly what I said I had found, and exactly what I said I've done so really you haven't answered any question. My question is WHY does this happen, I had always assumed it was something I did wrong, but it looks now looks more like the dependency scanner doesn't work ... View more

Christopher Painter wrote: Setup and Deployment projects were horrible. Automated dependency scanning is horrible. Just turn it off and do it yourself. Windows Installer goes to great lengths to be deterministic and declarative.... why ruin such a good thing? Huh? is this anything to do with the problem I've been experiencing or is this just useless advertising spam? ... View more

Guessing this is what you are after ... View more

This type of behavior happened on at least 6 different projects to me so far. This was in part why I originally stopped using ISLE. How would I create and find the build logs? ... View more

Nope. All I'm doing is modifying source then rebuilding the solution. I haven't added any dependency directly. Like I said though 1 day everything is there an fine, next time dependencies aren't in the setup, then some of them come back on their own while others are no longer present. This can be 3rd party DLLs or project outputs. To get around it, I have NOW manually added everything, but find the lack of constancy still baffling ... View more