Working with an ActiveX control installed by msi installer

Question

I created ActiveX control and it's .msi installer in a way described in this tutorial http://haseebakhtar.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/creating-an-activex-control-in-net-using-c/ . Then I installed that ActiveX control using this installer and tried to execute it in IE9. Installation went fine. And after that I got an excellent work of my component in a web browser.

Next time I ran the installer once more to uninstall the component. It seemed that everything was fine since I didn't have any errors while uninstalling the component and the folder of installation was removed from the disc. But then I could see that the activeX control continue to execute anytime I reload the page in IE. At first I thought that the IE had buffered it and then I decided to clear all browsing history. But it didn't help. I also restarted IE and my web server but that didn't give any changes. ActiveX control is still working.

My questions:

1) How can I uninstall it in proper way?

2) Should I uninstall and install my activeX component anytime I want to see any changes I did? Is there any easier way to see results of my work in IE?

Answer 1

After your have uninstalled your control, search the file system for its DLL and the registry for its GUID. If the GUID is still registered, that'd mean the uninstaller did not do its work properly. The DLL still could be there, if you had your web page open during the uninstall pass (as the web page would keep the DLL loaded). It should be gone upon reboot, though; if it is not, that would be again a problem of the MSI script.

Note, you could have your control installed automatically by IE without MSI, provided the control only uses HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive for its registration, here is how . Although, you would need to digitally sign your control package for this to happen, which is always a good idea anyway.