Comments on: Stopping a Web Site to Remove Locked Log Files During a WiX Uninstall

By: Nicholas Piasecki

Nicholas Piasecki — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 02:13:20 +0000

@Christopher

If my application weren’t the only Web application running on a dedicated server, I’d probably explore it. Since WiX doesn’t have a built-in custom action for controlling the start and stop of application pools, to my knowledge, writing my own or figuring out to shell out to some IIS VBS script would have been developer gold-plating that would be tangential to my deployment goal.

Still, it’s a good suggestion for those who would intend for their Web application to be deployed in a less controlled environment. In that case, I guess a few exec’s out to iisapp.vbs would do the trick.

By: Christopher Painter

Christopher Painter — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 01:29:41 +0000

Have you considered just shutting down the associated app pool instead of brining down all of IIS? On a production server, that could really other tenants off.

By: Nicholas Piasecki

Nicholas Piasecki — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:24:32 +0000

Rob,

Ha! I don’t disagree. But I found it quite unexpected and amusing the first time that it happened to me.

By: Rob Mensching

Rob Mensching — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:05:20 +0000

While I agree there are some pretty crazy things in the Windows Installer, the rollback mechanism really makes sense. The goal is to ensure that the machine always ends up in a “known state”. That means either the software is fully installed or fully uninstalled. If something causes the transformation between states to fail then the transformation is rolledback to its original state.