In Wix MSI: Killing a process upon uninstallation

I added a custom action that should kill my application using taskkill CMD when someone tries to uninstall it using the add/remove in the control panel using the following code :

<Property Id="TASKKILL">
        <DirectorySearch Id="SysDir" Path="[SystemFolder]" Depth="1">
            <FileSearch Id="taskkillExe" Name="taskkill.exe" />
        </DirectorySearch>
</Property>

<CustomAction Id="ServerKill" Property="TASKKILL" Execute="immediate" Impersonate="yes" Return="ignore" ExeCommand="/F /FI &quot;IMAGENAME EQ App.exe&quot;"/>

<InstallExecuteSequence>
    <Custom Action="ServerKill" After="FindRelatedProducts"/>   
</InstallExecuteSequence>

However this does not work. If someone can tell me how to fix it or even share a better/easier way to kill my app process I would be grateful.

p.s
also tried to use WMIC using cmd. That really didn't work and the installation itself did not finish at all because of this.

Solution

Perhaps you can try the CloseApplication feature from the Util schema: http://wixtoolset.org/documentation/manual/v3/xsd/util/closeapplication.html

See here for an example code snippet: https://sourceforge.net/p/wix/mailman/message/20186650/

UPDATE: I ran some tests and this element works a little differently from what I expected. The first thing you need to add is the reference to the wixUtilExtension file. On the command line this is:

candle -ext WiXUtilExtension Test.wxs
light -ext WixUtilExtension Test.wixobj

In Visual Studio I think you simply add a project reference to WixUtilExtension.dll.

Then you simply add something like this to your wxs source file:

  <util:CloseApplication Id="CloseNotepad" Target="notepad.exe"
                         CloseMessage="yes" RebootPrompt="no">
  </util:CloseApplication>

And add this at the top of your wxs file:

<Wix xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2006/wi" 
     xmlns:util="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/UtilExtension">

It looks like Wix takes care of the rest (custom actions and a custom table in your MSI with the list of processes to kill).

Here is my full test file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Wix xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2006/wi" 
     xmlns:util="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/UtilExtension">

   <Product Id="*" UpgradeCode="12345678-1234-1234-1234-111111111111" 
            Name="Example Product Name" Version="0.0.1" Manufacturer="Example Company Name" Language="1033">
      <Package InstallerVersion="200" Compressed="yes" Comments="Windows Installer Package"/>
      <Media Id="1" Cabinet="product.cab" EmbedCab="yes"/>
 
      <Directory Id="TARGETDIR" Name="SourceDir">
         <Component Id="ApplicationFiles" Guid="*">
        </Component>
      </Directory>
 
      <Feature Id="DefaultFeature" Level="1">
         <ComponentRef Id="ApplicationFiles"/>
      </Feature>

      <util:CloseApplication Id="CloseNotepad" Target="notepad.exe" CloseMessage="yes" RebootPrompt="no"></util:CloseApplication>
   </Product>
</Wix>

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