Aaron Stebner from Microsoft blogged about how to determine if the 1.1 version of the .NET framework is installed. Unfortunately, that is just to detect if 1.1 is installed.
One method of checking that Aaron quoted is described by a Microsoft Knowledge Base article. This approach is impossible to perform programmaticly. He also gives a registry key to check for the 1.1 .NET framework, but is a bit unclear if this key is for 1.1 or 1.1 with the service pack.
Other methods of checking I uncovered are difficult to do in code in a manner that makes sense to work in the generic case. The confusion that led to Aaron's post in the first place are questions (and the answers/lack of answers) posed in newsgroups, like this one.
The .NET framework version checking problem reminds me of old InstallShield code. I can't recall if this was built into InstallShield or if it was a bad code sample, but lots of installs failed on Windows 2000 simply because the install code checked to see if you were NT 4.0 SP3 or higher. The detection code was not based on proper logic, but rather if OS version >= 4 and SP version < 3, do not install. What a headache (at least until Windows 2000 SP3 came out)!
Fortunately, Aaron is going to research getting a code sample to detect the old versions and hopefully Microsoft can provide a future-proof method to determine this in upcoming revisions.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Detecting .NET Framework 1.1 SP1
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2 comments:
For an MSI installs what about the MsiNetAssemblySupport property?
I guess I should have been clearer in the post. This detection method is from the perspective of a bootstrapper that would detect the .NET framework/version and decide if the framework or a service pack needs to be downloaded/installed prior to running the MSI.
Once in the MSI or from inside a .NET application it is trivial to detect the version of the framework, as the last poster pointed out.
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