how to manually purge an malformed wix-burn package?

Question

I am in the process of learning how to develop a custom managed bootstrapper for wix-burn. Up to my knowlege there are no official tutorials, unofficial tutorials are always filled with WPF stuff which I'm not interested in and most people on forums do not do much more than saying that you must create a class that inherits from BootstrapperApplication and overrides the Run() method.

I did that, created the config file, added the payloads to the xml markup. The resulting installer did nothing, actually it ran forever, only killing it stopped it. I sincerely expected that calling base.Run() would give me some basic default GUI-less behavior. But that is only an abstract method. Eventually I learned that I must call some Engine.functions() to actually do some work. So I wrote this to test:

protected override void Run()
{
    Engine.Detect();
    Engine.Plan(LaunchAction.Install);
    Engine.Apply(IntPtr.Zero);
    Engine.Quit(0);
}

I successfully compiled a package that actually installed, the problem is that it can not be uninstalled. My question is, what can I do to purge it from my system? What registry keys must I erase, what cached packages must I delete, and what else must I do to get rid of it?

Answer 1

First, the registry key will be in one of the two locations listed below -- and it's probably the first one since the second is for 32-bit applications installed on a 64-bit OS.

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninst‌​all

Second, you can use the registry key to determine where the executable is cached for uninstall, which is probably in a folder that looks like C:\ProgramData\Package Cache.

If this were an .msi installation, there's another registry key and the file is cached in a different location as mentioned here.

Other links:

• https://superuser.com/questions/401511/how-to-remove-a-broken-program-from-the-programs-and-features-list-in-windows-7
• https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/247501