An error occurred while validating. HRESULT = '8000000A'

Update as of 6/14/2017

the Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Installer Projects extension now includes a command line helper tool for making the registry setting much easier to apply Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Installer Projects

Example paths of the tool (based on the version of Visual Studio installed)

Professional Edition: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\VSI\DisableOutOfProcBuild\DisableOutOfProcBuild.exe

Community Edition: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\VSI\DisableOutOfProcBuild\DisableOutOfProcBuild.exe

From the README

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This simple tool is meant to help users set the registry key needed to get around this error that can appear when building installer projects using command line builds:

ERROR: An error occurred while validating. HRESULT = '8000000A'

The tool is meant for Visual Studio 2017+ and sets this reg key for a particular installed Visual Studio instance for the current user. So if you're setting this on a build agent make sure to use the user account that the build will use.

Run "DisableOutOfProcBuild.exe help" for usage details.

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This is a known issue in Visual Studio 2010 (a race condition). See this connect item.

We've run into this as well, and had a very unsatisfying support call on this issue with Microsoft. Long story short: it's a known issue, it won't be solved, and Microsoft advises to move away from Visual Studio Setup projects (.vdproj).

We've worked around this issue by triggering the MSI build a second time when it fails a first time. Not nice, but it works most of the time (error rate is down from ~ 10% to ~ 1%).

Update for those who got this issue for VS2013 or VS2015 after upgrading a VS200X setup project using the Microsoft Visual Studio Installer Projects extension.

Following the recipe for v1.0.0.0 from MS finally made it work for me:

Microsoft Visual Studio Installer Projects

Unfortunately we couldn't address all cases of the command line issue for this release as we're still investigating the appropriate way to address them. What we do have is a workaround that we believe will work for almost all of them. If you are still suffering this issue then you can try to change the DWORD value for the following registry value to 0: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0_Config\MSBuild\EnableOutOfProcBuild (VS2013)
or
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0_Config\MSBuild\EnableOutOfProcBuild (VS2015)
If this doesn't exist you can create it as a DWORD.

I read somewhere online about this, and I have fixed it like this (it was suggested by someone):

• open your setup project file (.vdproj) in notepad (or any other text editor)

• delete these lines at a beginning of the .vdproj file:

  "SccProjectName" = "8:"
  "SccLocalPath" = "8:"
  "SccAuxPath" = "8:"
  "SccProvider" = "8:"
  

• build again - error is gone

That error didn't stop me from deploying, building, debugging (or anyting) my project it just annoyed me. And it came on even if I set all projects to be build in a current configuration and the setup project not to.