MSI register dll - Self-Registration considered harmful

Question

I have a .NET winform application that requires to register a native dll during installation. My question is how can I register a dll (regsvr32 ABC.dll) as part of MSI installion process? Similary how can I un-register a dll as part of un-installation process?

Answer 1

vsdrfCOMSelfReg is not a best practice. Try vsdrfCOM instead. This will "extract" ( or try, vdproj is a POS sometimes ) the COM metadata from the DLL and author it into the correct COM tables. This is better then hoping an out of process call to DllRegisterServer will work at install time.

Now that MSI is natively aware of your COM resources, it will handle install and uninstall for you.