As part of the installation process, our product installs .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 using the ~2Mb dotNetFx35setup.exe bootstrap. It runs the bootstrap with the full UI, only using the "/norestart" command line switch. In most cases, there are no problems (i.e., downloads the framework and installs and then our product's installation process continues).

However, in some instances (in particular, one XP SP3 VM), the .NET installer will show a dialog saying "The following applications should be closed before continuing with setup" and lists some programs. The problem is that usually when this occurs, the .NET installer lists our product's installer as needing to be shut down. This is a problem, as we don't want our users shutting down our installer for obvious reasons.

We don't want to run the .NET setup in silent mode (using /q switch), so does anyone know ifthere is any way we can keep this particular dialog from showing up?

Hi Mpa109,

I am moving this thread from Base ".NET FrameworkSetup" forum to the "ClickOnce and Setup & Deployment Projects" forum, since the issue is related to deployment. There are more deployment experts in the "ClickOnce and Setup & Deployment Projects" forum.

Thanks

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Hi mpa109,

The dialog saying "The following applications should be closed before continuing with setup" will be shown when the running application on your computer occupy some of the system file that need to be replaced or modified during installation. Also .NET Framework ask you to shut down some service before installation.

There is no document showing which service should be shut down and which system file should not be occupied. So you'd better shut down the application that is required to be closed and install .NET Framework. It is always recommend to shut down running program before install system level component.

By the way, which version of VM do you use? What is the duty of that XP sp3 VM?

Sincerely,
Kira Qian

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Hi Kira,

I understand the reasoning behind the dialog showing up, it's just that since our installer launches the .NET installer, and .NET installerthen says to shut down our installer, we find that that behavior may be confusing to the user, so we were hoping to find away to limit that particular dialog, since we don't want our users shutting down our installer part way through.

So, any suggestions on how to limit that dialog would be appreciated, and if it's not possible, then I would like to know that, too.

This problem is not happening on all VMs we are using, just a couple of them. Not sure of which VMWare version this particular user is running, but I'm fairly certain the XP sp3 VM is solely used for testing and the image is reverted each time our software is reinstalled.

-Matt

Did you write an installer program that uses the .NET Framework? If you did, then it's very possible that Windows will want to update files you are using.

Typically people write bootstrapper programs (like setup.exe in VS deployment projects)in C++ programto avoid these kinds of issues - they can be built to have no dependencies that might need updating.

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Phil Wilson

Hi Phil,

We're using InstallShield 2009 in this particular case, which, as far as I know, does not rely on the .NET Framework to run.

-Matt

You'd have to get the Sysinternals ProcessExplorer tool to see what's going on. You'd look at the setup program and see what Dlls are loaded that might need updating. Some candidates are mscoree.dll, msi.dll. Does it tell you the file name?
The other thing is to set MSI logging policy to log the install, and then look for "in use" in the logs for the install.

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Phil Wilson

It doesn't say the file name that is in use, just the name of the window of what offending program is running (in this case, the name of our installer).

However, I don't really care the reasoning behind why .NET setup is complaining about a file in use that my installer is using (they are both setup programs, so I can understand that maybesome lower level files need to be updated, etc.), I'm just trying to find if that particular file in use dialog can somehow be ignored or modified so it doesn't confuse the user and/or have our user shut down our installer.

We don't want to run the .NET installer in quiet mode, we just want that dialog either ignored or not have our installer's name show up in it. Is that possible?

So, I'll assume that there is no way to tell the .NET installerto *not* show the"file in use" dialog, and that "file in use" dialog can not be told to ignore our installer program that launched the .NET installer in the first place.