What the hell were the guys at Microsoft on when they build the Setup and Deployment Project code for VS2003? To say that is sucks would be some of the biggest understatement ever. All I wanted was for my application to delete some intermediate files when it uninstalls. You'd expect to be able to do that from the File System settings of the install project, but you'd be dead wrong; of course, the next logical step is to interject a script of some sort into the uninstall chain. Simple enough.

I wrote a 7-line batch script to do the work for me (batch files are crappy scripting tools, but you'd be surprised what you can do with them with enough patience) only to find out that, well, you can't add bloody batch files as custom actions; you can only add DLLs, EXEs and VBScript/JScript files. So I spent an hour teaching myself the basics of VBScript (I already have a solid handle of VB6, just needed a look at the WSH reference and some turorials about FileSystemObject) and moved on.

Only to find out that the script doesn't work; it's run from a god-knows-which working directory, meaning you have to do some extra fussing around to get to the right directory. After a little reading I found the Session.TargetPath property, which apparently doesn't do the trick. To make a long story short, I found a tutorial on The Code Project which showed me how to do it:

Why the hell is the simplest thing with MSI so goddamn convoluted?