Generally the solution is to do something that looks like malware, or use a third party feature that side steps the problem, as happens with javascript.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230911-00/?p=108749

Pseudo-malware is pretty much the way to go as a developer in my experience.

I believe his suggestion of a javascript file that deletes itself works only works because javascript gets sandboxed and doesn’t suffer from Windows “flaw” with file locks.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230911-00/?p=108749

While Raymond does offer a solution he’s also completely side stepping any responsibility on Microsoft’s part in creating and perpetuating this problem without offering their own native solution.

The reason you expect this is because Windows has a file lock behaviour that won’t let you delete a file when it’s in use, in Linux this limitation doesn’t exist.

Raymond Chan, arguably one of the best software engineers in the world, and a Microsoft employee, has repeatedly lamented the near malware like work arounds developers have had to invent to overcome this limitation with uninstallers.

Think about uninstalling a game. You need to run “uninstall.exe” but you don’t want uninstall.exe to exist after you’ve run it… but you can’t delete a file that’s in use. Uninstall.exe will always be in use when you run it….so how do you make it remove itself?

Schedule a task? Side load a process? Inject a process? Many ways…. But most look like malware.

Linux has never suffered this flaw.