Assuming self-registration is used to install components as part of a larger installer program, why is self-registration bad? E.g. self-registering vb custom controls or capicom or whatever. I acknowledge that self-registration is probably not as safe in the case of a dll you wrote yourself, but I'm not discussing those.
The MSDN lists several reasons why self-registration is bad, reproduced here:
Rollback won't work properly.
OK, this reason makes sense.
Advertisement will not work as well.
Ignoring the fact that advertisement is only important for certain types of software clients, I don't understand why this is an issue. Only the main application needs to be advertised, not its components.
Self-registration does not support per-user keys properly.
So what? Giving every user access to "common" components is not a bad thing unless you have a lot of users on the machine, in which case it's still not world-ending.
Self-registration is more susceptible to coding errors.
I can definitely believe this, except in the case of dlls which were written by Microsoft (they may have errors, but I don't think trusting them is unreasonable). And in the case of tlbs and ocxs which were generated by software, coding errors seem pretty unlikely.
Self-registering dlls may link to other dlls.
In the case of dlls generated by programs, it doesn't seem likely that self-registration will fail due to this but adding the registration keys manually would have worked. I'd rather have my self-registration return an error that I'm missing the dlls.
I'm sure this will draw flames :/
Edit: Crossed out arguments that I think actually matter (based on user responses and my own).
As far as this item:
Self-registration does not support per-user keys properly.
So what? Giving every user access
to "common" components is not a bad
thing unless you have a lot of users
on the machine, in which case it's
still not world-ending.
It's not just a matter of how many users are on a machine, but also what permissions they have. If not an administrator, the user will be unlikely to have permission to update the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE portion of the registry.