Mark Jones' Blog

• Building an MSI in Visual Studio 2005/2008 to work on a SharePoint 64 bit installation with a Custom Action

  Mark Jones - Tuesday, April 21, 2009

  Sorry about the title, but, this blog posting is an attempt to save you from the nightmare I have just been through so wanted to be descriptive.

  Here's my rig:

  I am running a Windows 2008 Enterprise Server with SharePoint 2007 64 bit and Visual Studio 2008.

  I have been trying to create an MSI (using VS), that installs Action Server on a SharePoint 64 bit platform. My main problem arrives when the installer attempts to run my Custom Action. The Custom Action is responsbile for installing evaluation licenses into the SharePoint Config databases. Every time, my Custom Action hits a line containing, "SPFarm.Local", the installer would throw an error like this :

  "Attempted to Load a 64 bit assembly on a 32 bit platform"

  After a bit of research, the main crux of the problem is that (by default) the Custom Action runs as a 32bit process and attempts to load the Microsoft.SharePoint.dll (which is 64 bit). Hence, the error. So, how do you get around this ?

  Well in short, we offer big respect to Heath Stewart! The solution isn't a coded solution, or some property you can flick inside of the Visual Studio Project. You need to ...

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