Cancel during .NET installation causes hang

jsmith · Post by **jsmith** » Wed Jan 21, 2009 2:10 pm

MichaelNesmith wrote:All other referenced items are other reports.

We're asking for your help in reproducing it. Don't blame us for not trying!

Michael, the post you are replying to is not from me. I emailed you this morning and await a response.

Cheers,
Jack

MichaelNesmith · Post by **MichaelNesmith** » Wed Jan 21, 2009 3:02 pm

Jack,

Thank you for willing to co-operate by offering an upload. We will get back to you with our findings as soon as we have the VM.

jsmith · Post by **jsmith** » Wed May 20, 2009 11:56 am

I'm following up on this thread to announce that IA9 solves this problem. Michael and I took the conversation offline after my last post in January and they were able to reproduce and subsequently resolve the issue with a VM that I sent to them. I have verified that the fix is included in InstallAware 9.

MichaelNesmith · Post by **MichaelNesmith** » Wed May 20, 2009 4:43 pm

Thanks for the follow up.

However, I have to stress that while the installer will quit, it will NOT terminate the child process which is actually installing .NET. We could kill this process but that might damage your Windows Installer registry and corrupt your Windows installation for good - mandating a reinstall of your entire operating system. A very undesirable outcome.

jsmith · Post by **jsmith** » Thu May 21, 2009 1:47 pm

Interesting. Reading this had me concerned it would do the same thing if I canceled while it was installing our actual product, given that the freeze was also occurring if I canceled while it was installing our files. So I tested it to make sure the installation of our product doesn't silently complete if you cancel the installation. It does not. I tested canceling while it was copying files as well as after Apply Install is called, when it's calling into our custom action DLL. In both cases, the installation is rolled back and the system is left as if the installation was never attempted.

MichaelNesmith · Post by **MichaelNesmith** » Fri May 22, 2009 4:50 am

Of course it wouldn't. InstallAware, when installing something directly, either via Apply Changes, or via (Un)Install MSI Setup, can monitor and abort the actual progress. However when running an external application using Run Program (As), no such monitoring is available. There is simply no mechanism, unlike for MSI files, to monitor the progress and abort the installation of installers based out of EXE files.