Today I installed the latest 3.0 version of the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset (3.0.5419.0), which integrates with both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 and provides a new project type and project template to create WiX setups. When I clicked the File, New Project menu, WiX project type, it worked fine in VS 2005. However, it caused the following error in VS 2008:

“.wixproj cannot be opened because its project type is not supported by this version of the application. To open it, please use a version that supports this type of project.”

After searching the web for a while to no avail, I finally noticed that this problem was caused because my shortcut to VS 2008 included /SafeMode after devenv.exe. When the shortcut didn’t include that command-line switch, it worked fine. That switch disables the Add-In Manager and prevents add-ins and 3rd party packages (such the WiX one) being loaded. I had it because I have my MZ-Tools add-in marked to load on startup (to avoid loading it by hand through the Add-In Manager each time I debug it), but I don’t want it to be loaded the very first time that I open VS to load its project, to avoid the problem PRB: ‘Could not copy temporary files to the output directory’ error building Visual Studio .NET add-in. Another way to prevent it is to press the left Shift key while VS is started, but that approach doesn’t work well on Windows 7 and VS 2010 will not support it, as explained in the article, so using /SafeMode will be the only approach.

Now, it would be nice if VS showed a more helpful message such as:

“.wixproj cannot be opened because its project type belongs to a 3rd party package that is not allowed to load when the Visual Studio process (devenv.exe) is launched with the /SafeMode switch.”