Shell Extensions and Explorer Process?

[elthombre]

Hi,

We have a shell extension and a silent installer such as this might be a good choice. We know that we can leverage the regasm to register the Shell extension which should alleviate the need to restart the Explorer process.

Meanwhile, it is our understanding that we must sill restart the Explorer process on uninstall and, presently, looking at the Process class to handle this.

We are new to the Squirrel installer and were wondering if Squirrel can handle these specific requirements?

Thanks

[robmen]

Squirrel is not designed for this use case.

[elthombre]

Thanks

[anaisbetts]

You can technically do it but I would tend to agree with @robmen (though tbh, killing Explorer for any reason already puts you into "Gross hack" territory so I guess you may as well lol)

[anaisbetts]

@caesay Unfortunately that's not practical for many shell extensions (if you delete all of the surrounding files of a shell extension but leave the actual DLL, nothing good is going to happen!) Many Shell extensions have historically unfortunately had to resort to this workaround (regardless of install technology).

The most "proper" way to do this is to uninstall the shell extension registry only, demand a reboot, then on next reboot do the full uninstall. But however disruptive killing Explorer is, forcing a reboot is absolutely more disruptive!

[caesay]

No need to debate further but I don't follow the logic here. Unregister your extensions via registry, your com servers etc. Don't delete anything. Queue everything to be cleaned up at next boot, and prompt the user to restart now or later, at the user's convenience. No need to force anything at all. Killing explorer or dwm will often necessitate a reboot anyways; because many applications do not recover well from this.

[elthombre]

the problem is that it is not convenient. For the user, it is not convenient to reboot. Therein lay the trouble.

[caesay]

Exactly. Which is why you do not kill / restart critical processes (which can break things). And why you don't force a reboot. Let the user choose to restart "Later", and it will get cleaned up the next time they naturally restart their computer. That might be a few hours later, or days later. At their convenience.

[anaisbetts]

I think the real moral of the story is, Shell Extensions suck, don't write them 😅