Must specify value for source. at System.Configuration.Install.TransactedInstaller.Install(IDictionary savedState)

I found myself encountering this problem while preparing material for the next post on services and .NET. As I was calling the .Installers.Add() method from the instance of my TransactedInstaller object (called ti) I realised that while it expects you to pass a new instance of an object of type Installer, I was actually passing, “new ServiceInstaller”. This had at one point been the name of my class- but the problem turned out to be that this translates not to the name of my class, but to Service.ServiceProcess.ServiceInstaller.

In my class the code which dealt with service installation was:

class InstallerClass : Installer
{
    public InstallerClass()
    {
        var spi = new ServiceProcessInstaller();
        var si = new ServiceInstaller();

        spi.Account = ServiceAccount.LocalSystem;
        si.StartType = ServiceStartMode.Automatic;
        si.ServiceName = SVC_APP_NAME;

        Installers.Add(spi);
        Installers.Add(si);
    }

Some lines below in a different method I was calling TransactedInstaller:

ti.Installers.Add(new ServiceInstaller());
ti.Install(new Hashtable());

The exception complaining about, “must specify a value for source” actually meant, I hadn’t set the ServiceName property. The reason for this is that my TransactedInstaller was creating a new instance of a framework class, rather than a new instance of my class, so the code that set ServiceName was never being called and violla: must specify value for source.

So, an easy fix:

ti.Installers.Add(new SampleInstallerClass());
ti.Install(new Hashtable());