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July 23, 2008

Entity Framework - No Confidence

In the .NET circles I always here comments regarding EF. I usually stay clear of them since I'm an Installation Developer not an Application Developer. Recently I was asked to write an install for a program that had a dependency on ADO.NET EF Beta3. I downloaded the EFB3SETUPX86.EXE package and tried to install it.

The keyword is TRIED.

The first error message informs met hat I must have .NET 3.5 installed. Funny, it is installed. Then I get a fatal crash. Ohwell, atleast the MSI is using the ubber-cool Red motif!

Either way I did some poking around and I found this launch condition to be the culprit:

Installed OR
(DP_NETFX35_INSTALLED_VERSION >= "3.5.20904.00") and (DP_NETFX35_INSTALLED_VERSION <= "3.5.21203.00")

I seem to have .NET 3.5 SP1 ( BETA ) 3.5.30428.01. Funny, EF BETA 3 package seems to be hardwired to not run against a beta version of the framework when it's a beta package itself. The part that really threw me off is the way the externalUI is used it looked like the LaunchCondition was information and something else blew up later.