What needs to be allowed through firewall to install Wix extension in Visual Studio?

[piotr-klima]

Visual Studio extension installation fails for Wix in a VM in our corporate network. Other VS extensions install fine on the same VM, and Wix installs on a laptop, but the VM is in an Azure subscription with an additional firewall, so we suspect this might be the problem.

The error message displayed on screen is:
c2rsetup.officeapps.live.com unexpectedly closed the connection.

In the log we can see what it is that fails to download:
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Setup.PackageFailureException: Package 'WixToolset.VisualStudioExtension.Dev17' failed to download

We opened port 443 for *.officeapps.live.com on the firewall but that didn't seem to change anything.

Are there additional hosts and/or ports that we need to open for this to work?

[bevanweiss]

I wouldn't expect explicit inbound firewall rules would be needed.
The established / associated connection rule should typically be enough.

And it's unusual to have many deny type outbound rules configured.
But outbound for (destination ports) 443 and 80 towards *.officeapps.live.com for HTTP/HTTPS requests should have done it.
If you're using a packet inspection firewall (which must be the case if your rule can be *.hostname) then you could just have it as HTTP/HTTPS request outbound (rather than tying it to a specific destination port number)

I imagine it working for other extensions but not Wix relates to where the Wix Extension is hosted vs the others. Where Microsoft host extensions is probably complicated by the number of end users that access certain extensions. Widely used extensions will be distributed more across more hosting locations, others (like Wix) are probably only hosted from a limited number of locations.
It's possible that the c2rsetup DNS resolution had problems, or the c2rsetup instance that you were being directed to had issues at the time that you were trying to use it..

[piotr-klima]

Thank you. We will try opening port 80 as well if we can't avoid the whole issue altogether.

Currently I'm trying to talk the team doing this into installing it in a different Azure subscription that doesn't have the corporate firewall. The install did work fine on a VM in that subscription, while we were able to replicate the issue on another VM in another subscription behind the same firewall, so that seems to eliminate an intermittent c2rsetup instance issue.

[robmen]

Note that the installation of extensions into Visual Studio is done completely by the VSIX Installer, which is part of Visual Studio. Sadly, there is very little we can do to improve its installation experience. If you are having problems installing extensions into Visual Studio, you really need to follow up with the Visual Studio team, as they own the experience completely.

[piotr-klima]

User contacted me this morning that it worked. The problem, indeed as suggested above, was not a firewall or anything related, but a missing .NET Foundations Project certificate.