I should blog more on deployment stuff using the built in stuff in visual studio. Its not great but it still is fairly powerfull.

Today I ran into a fairly common issue that not many people seem to have a solution for (besides creating a whole new setup project):

"Unable to get installer types in the C:\blah\blah.dll assembly. --> One or more of the types in the assembly unable to load"

The reason that this error happens (for me) is that my custom action in my deployment has depenancies that are not installed on the target system. The MSI first extracts the assembly, loads it, then runs the custom action. If a dependancy is missing you get this error (yes I wish the error was a bit clearer).  Either vs did not properly include them as dependancies in your MSI or you excluded them. Once the proper depenancies are installed on the target system the deploy should go fine.