Windows installer - prevent overriding a dll.

Question

I’m creating a setup project (Windows installer) in vs2010. When the user install it for the 1st time – everything is working just fine, but when the user try to upgrade the old application that’s running prevent of coping the new dlls to the installed folder. How to show a user a dialog box that force him to shut down an application that prevent the installer from override a dll?

Answer 1

You need to check if a process with the name of your executable is running.

Then you can either abort the installation, ask the user to shut down the process or shut it down for them.

If you go for the second option you'll need to double check that they actually have shut it down before proceeding.