My WIX installer launches an immediate custom action. The custom action starts a WPF dialog prompting the user for a BD connection parameters (I basically wrote the 'new connection' DB prompter dialog in WPF, to get me a connection string that the custom action can inject in the installed application's configuration file). The WIX code is fairly simple to figure out, and I know I execute the custom action just fine - I put there a MessageBox and a MmsiBreak on the call to my custom action method. I get there without a problem. When the custom action instantiates my WPF dialog window, I get an InvaliOperationException: "The calling thread must be STA, because many UI components require this".
The same code runs fine when I put it in a standard WPF application, because VisualStudio generates boiler plate code with Main() that has a STAThreadAttribute on it. I can't tack that attribute on the msiexec caller, and if I try to set the thread apartment state in my custom action, it fails:
Thread.CurrentThread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA);
Is not supposed to work for framework past 2.0.
Is there any way to do what I'm trying to do here? I'd appreciate some pointers.
EDIT
I even tried to run the dialog in its own thread, e.g. the code is like this:
// Static class members
static ManualResetEvent _done = new ManualResetEvent(false);
static ActionResult _caResult;
static Session _session;
static Thread _worker;
[CustomAction]
static public ActionResult PromptForDB(Session session)
{
_session = session;
_worker = new Thread(WorkerThread);
_worker.Start();
_done.WaitOne();
return _caResult;
}
[STAThread]
static void WorkerThread()
{
try
{
Prompter wnd = new Prompter();
if (!(bool)wnd.ShowDialog())
{
_caResult = ActionResult.SkipRemainingActions;
}
else
{
// Harvest our properties (omitted from this post)
_caResult = ActionResult.Success;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
_caResult = ActionResult.Failure;
_session.Log("Error: " + ex.Message);
}
finally
{
_done.Set();
}
}
That does not work either.
