Troubleshooting Red ‘X’s in the Compact 7 Installation

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Hey everyone, we have been fielding some questions about installation requirements for Compact 7. I had Kyle Roe write up some general troubleshooting instructions for you.

As with all software installations, there are times when WindowsEmbeddedCompact7.exe cannot complete the install successfully. Great effort has been made prevent the installation from failing. Sometimes the installation requires other software to be installed first. In the case of Platform Builder, Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 are the prerequisites. Windows Embedded Compact 7 will search for the prerequisites when it starts. This is part of the action taken while the Splash screen is displayed. ( as a side note, the Splash screen can be moved to show the program has not locked up.)

So what happens if the prerequisites are not found?

You, the user, will see Red X’s next to options that require prerequisites to be meet.

RTM display.

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With the updated software, a message is displayed explaining what prerequisites are required.

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So why is Shared Source greyed out with a red X next to it when all the prerequisites are installed?

Evaluation copies of the software do not come with Shared Source. But you can access more information about Shared Source right from the link the description field.

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If you are still having trouble with WindowsEmbeddedCompact7.exe, you can either reach out help, or investigate the issue yourself. For both options you will need to access the log files that the software creates. These log files are in the user profile temp folder, of the user who ran the software. The easiest way to get to that folder is to click on Start and Select Run.

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In the text window type %temp%, click Ok.

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That will open your temp folder and you should see the log files listed.

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All four of log files shown were created by the software. When some prerequisites are not found, an entry like the highlighted one here will explain why you are having a problem.

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The snippet above is an entry showing that Visual Studios 2008 could not be found on the computer.

When Visual Studios 2008 is found at the proper version, an entry like this can be found in the log. clip_image008

If you are having issues, I hope this helps explain how to trouble shoot it. In our efforts, we have attempted to prevent as many issues as we can, and present as much information as possible when the issue can not be prevented. Let me know how we are doing.