.Net Windows Services and InstallState file - is it really needed?

Question

I\'ve got a number of managed code Windows Services for which we use the Frameworks InstallUtil tool to install into the service control manager. This tool creates a new file at

Answer 1

The InstallState file is used by InstallUtil.exe for uninstalling the service/assembly. The data contained within it is uninstall data only. If you haven't read the short obscure reference on MSDN, you can read it here.

Maybe a setup package uninstalls everything for you correctly but I'm not sure if a service would uninstall properly if you were calling InstallUtil by hand/script yourself.

That's the supposed value of a .InstallState file.