Setup Project Error: Unable to update the dependencies of the project

UPDATED POST: 14/07/2006

Martin Wills has sent me some information about this problem. It is my lucky day 🙂

1. Microsoft do now have a hot-fix for this problem – see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917036/en-usYou need to ask for the fix – they then give you a web-site and a password.The fix seems to be working for me. After clearing the Hierarchy and File sections as described here and re-adding the files, I’ve had no recurrence of the issue.

Great work Martin and thanks very much for helping out.

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OLD POST
I have been working on some Setup projects in vs2005 recently (which was converted from vs2003) and I have been receiving an error “Unable to update the dependencies of the project” when assembly versions change. The (setup) .vdproj file stores the version numbers for assemblies that it references. This file doesn’t update itself with the new version numbers and also REFRESH DEPENDENCIES fails with “The operation can not be completed”. I finally found a msdn feedback articleThis article has a workaround article which basically states the following:

Workaround Description:
I have consistently used this method to get around this bug instead of rebuilding my setup projects. This applies to both merge module projects AND setup projects. Manually remove the data in the Hierarchy and Files section of the project files.

Workaround Steps:
1. Open .VDPROJ file
2. Find the “Hierarchy” section. Delete everything so the section looks like this:

“Hierarchy”
{

}

3. Find the “File” section. Delete everything so the section looks like this:

“File”
{

}

4. Reload the project
5. Rebuild the project.

This workaround removes all of the files associated with the project, therefore, they will have to be re-added. A real pain until this issue is fixed.