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I am trying to register a DLL using WiX. Now I know and understand that I should use heat and get it to pull the registry information for me, but heat seems to fail with the following error message: heat.exe : warning HEAT5150 : Could not harvest data from a file that was expected to be a SelfReg DLL: C:\Users\seb\Desktop\Development\addin.dll. If this file does not support SelfReg you can ignore this warning. Otherwise, this error detail may be helpful to diagnose the failure: Unable to load file: C:\Users\seb\Desktop\Development\addin.dll, error: 193

I've looked around and found this post which explains a bit more in detail about registering DLLs but I would like to avoid the self registration route if possible. I also see mention of manually registering the DLLs further down below, but I'm not too well versed with the registry or COM objects that well to know where I could even get the CLSID, ProgId, and any other information that has been mentioned.

If anyone can point me in the right direction or explain to me what I need to do to run the DLL through heat it would be greatly appreciated.

Community
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Seb
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3 Answers3

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I know this is old but I wanted to add an answer here - the reason this occurs is because the dll you are trying to register is 64 bit dll - and Heat.exe is 32 bit so it cannot load the dll in its address space. Anyway, just point to a 32 bit version of the dll to create the wxs file and you should not receive that error.

Brian Small
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Is this an unmanaged / native DLL? Does Dependency Walker show any missing dependencies? Usually this means the DllRegisterFunction failed and Heat couldn't extract any data. Fix that problem and you should get good XML meta.

Christopher Painter
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  • It's a DLL that was created using ATL 6.0. If I call regserv32 on it everything loads fine and the system recognizes it, but until now it has always been loaded as a SelfReg. – Seb Sep 18 '12 at 13:11
  • This kind of problem is really tricky to solve. If you can share the DLL I can try to extract it for you. You can also use a registry snapshot tool on a clean machine to capture the regsvr32 and then manually author into wxs. Or use InstallShield evaluation to extract the COM and WiX dark to decompile back to wxs. Lots of tricks but require experience. – Christopher Painter Sep 18 '12 at 15:07
  • Can't really share the DLL due to it being company property, but I have tried to use RegSpy and it's been frozen for about 8 hours. Hoping that it's just trying to pull the data out. – Seb Sep 18 '12 at 16:04
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I was getting same problem with Wix heat.exe : warning HEAT5150 : Could not harvest data from a file that was expected to be a SelfReg DLL. The reason is dll was unable to find dependency to load. I think you must be having similar problems. I ran Process Monitor tool and applied filter to capture heat.exe event. I was able to find the root cause of the problem. Basically I had to put all dependency dll to same location where my main dll was. For your case addin.dll needs to point to the same location where your dependent dll's are.

The following blog about this warning helped me lot to figure out root cause.

http://marc.durdin.net/2009/12/case-of-hidden-exception.html?

user1029083
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    After spending almost a day setting this up I still got nowhere with this. The error shown in the blog post mentions about an exception thrown by the target. In my case heat throws the exception saying that the file was unable to load. I even added all the dependencies that showed up in Process Monitor. Still I get the error. Maybe I'm just stuck with self registering this DLL. – Seb Sep 19 '12 at 22:13