TeamBuild and WiX

Have you ever run into this error using TeamBuild to build a WiX setup project?

light.exe : error LGHT0217: An unexpected external UI message was received: The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if you are running Windows in safe mode, or if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance.

Done building project "Setup.wixproj" -- FAILED.

It seems this problem is rampant on Vista build machines.  The solution usually had something to do with the vbscript engine, but I’ve tried all of those solutions and we were still failing WiX builds.  Besides, we’re using XP for our build machines.

I decided to login to our build machine using our build service account and manually build the WiX project through the IDE.  The project compiled fine so I kicked off another build.  That didn’t fix anything.  I then decided to compile the project using devenv.exe from the command line.  That compiled fine, but I noticed an ICE## warning.  At first I didn’t think anything of it because after this second step, our builds started to work.

Greg, being the manager that he is, told me to repeat the steps on our other build machine to see if that was indeed the fix to our problem.  I was hopeful, but it didn’t seem to work on the other machine.  Then he said to reboot the original build machine and repeat the steps.  Again, I was hopeful, but it looked like the steps I took before wasn’t the solution.

Later on in the day I tried to login to our build machine again using our service account to repeat the steps from before.  Firing a build didn’t work again, but this time that ICE## warning really caught my eye.  I remembered that the WiX project property page had some settings for ICE validation:

Although the ICE## message being returned by the build process was a warning, it was causing our build to fail.  Checking Supress ICE validation was the key and we now have an automated build for our WiX setup project.