Managed-Code Bootstrapper (BA) Fails to Launch on Fresh Machine — .NET Desktop Runtime Missing

[Shivapatne]

Question

While testing a WiX 6.0 Managed Bootstrapper Application (MBA) built using .NET Core, the installer fails to start on a fresh machine where the .NET Desktop Runtime is not installed.

The Event Viewer shows an error indicating that the required .NET runtime is missing. This prevents the bootstrapper from launching and displaying the UI.

I would like to know the recommended approach for handling this scenario —

Should we bundle the .NET Desktop Runtime installer within the WiX bundle and install it first?

Or is there any alternative approach in WiX 6 to ensure the BA runs even if .NET is not present?

Any official guidance or working example for resolving this dependency issue would be very helpful.

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• I (or an organization I'm a member of) pay the Open Source Maintenance Fee by sponsoring the wixtoolset project because I support the maintainers.

[Shivapatne]

this is the code

[robmen]

You can provide "primary" and "secondary" BootstrapperApplications. If your BAs prereqs are always present, a single BootstrapperApplication is enough. If not, you can use the WixPrerequisiteBootstrapperApplication (or your own BA without prereqs) to install prereqs. Then you can choose whether to make the "prereq BA" primary (as in it always tries to install the dependencies first) and your custom BA "secondary" (so it always runs after the "prereq BA") or_ you can always try to run your BA as "primary" and if it fails, fallback to the "secondary BA" to install prereqs. Burn has logic to toggle between them P -> S -> P for exactly this scenario.

Like all things bundle-related, end-to-end documentation is sorely lacking. So the examples in the WiX test often show best. This example has the custom BA as primary and this one has the custom BA as secondary.

Note: #8654 is open to add more documentation around Primary and Secondary as part of my WiX v7 work. I was just looking at this issue this weekend while fixing a couple of other issues. 😄