Problems Installing/uninstalling Guidance Automation Extensions and Toolkit

Installation issues surrounding the Guidance Automation Extensions and Toolkit seem pretty common, including the infamous error 2869. There are a lot of postings where people had their issues solved by simply running the installers with elevated Administrator prilleledge, either via a command prompt or .cmd file. I recently had some issues installing the Web Service Software Factory on a Vista box, and no amount of Administrator elevation would shift it. The Web Service Software factory claimed it needed GAX to be installed, however GAX was already there. The GAX uninstaller wouldn't run, giving error 2869. I tried using Control Panel as well as running msiexec /uninstall on the installer. My theory was that the GAX uninstall was failing the GAT was still installed, however the GAT installer died midway through - raising a blank dialog box. before rolling back it's attempt.

I finally got everything to play ball by following the manual removal instructions detailed in this MSDN Forum post. In case the link dies at some point, I'll quote the useful posting (from Tom Hollander) here:

First try to uninstall all guidance packages cleanly:
1. If they were installed through an MSI, try to remove it using Add/Remove Programs.
2. If they were installed using code, open the solution and run GAT’s Unregister recipe

Make sure you do not uninstall GAT until all code-registered packages have been removed!

If there are packages that cannot be removed, here is how to remove them manually:

1. Open C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Recipe Framework\RecipieFramework.xml
2. Remove any or all of the elements from the file (actually it’s a good idea to paste them into another window so you know which packages you have to clean out of the registry), and save the file
3. Open the registry and look for the following keys under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0
Packages\{77d93a80-73fc-40f8-87db-acd3482964b2}\Templates : Delete all subkeys that refer to guidance packages you don’t want any more (they will have GUIDs as their key names) Languages\CodeExpansions\CSharp\Paths : Delete all values that refer to guidance packages you don’t want any more
Menus : Delete all values that refer to guidance packages you don’t want any more (they will probably be at the bottom after all the ones named after GUIDs)
NewProjectTemplates\TemplateDirs : Expand each of the subkeys (they will have GUIDs as names) and expand the /1 key below that. If you find one whose (Default) value is named after an unwanted guidance package, delete the entire GUID key and the /1 key below that.
4. If any of the guidance packages you removed manually were installed from an MSI, run msizap to clean up the MSI-related registry settings.

Pardon the lousy formatting there. The instructions look long and painful, but they worked for me. After running through that list I could uninstall & reinstall GAX, before finally successfully installing the Web Service Software factory.

Tags: Microsoft

 Print | Posted on Monday, May 07, 2007 8:31 PM | Filed Under [ ASP.NET Visual Studio ]