Determining the Versions and Service Packs of the .NET Framework Installed on a System

I've been getting involved recently in authoring installation programs. One of the things that comes up is how to determine what versions and service packs for the .NET Framework are installed. Usually, a "System Search" (in InstallShield) can be used to determine this. But what on the system should be searched?

There's this article from Macrovision / InstallShield that talks about the MsiNetAssemblySupport property available with Windows Installer 2.0 and later. The property uses the latest version of FUSION.DLL found on the system. The article then goes on to state:

Additional Information
For additional information, click the following link to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318785

That KB article ("How to determine which versions of the .NET Framework are installed and whether service packs have been applied") provides a list of version stamps that correspond to a specific .NET Framework version and revision. The version stamps come from the MSCORLIB.DLLs that are installed by the various framework versions and revisions. So one is to search for all MSCORLIB.DLL files on the system and use the chart to determine what version(s) of the .NET Framework are installed.

Then, there's another MS KB article - "How to detect the installed version of the .NET Framework in a Visual Studio Setup and Deployment package" - that describes how to set up launch conditions in a Visual Studio Setup project to set properties based on the values of certain registry entries - specifically, entries residing in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\policy\vX.Y, where X is a major version and Y is a minor version number of the .NET Framework.

And finally, yet another MS KB article was published on 2006-02-28. This one is "How to use Visual C++ .NET to detect the .NET Framework versions and service packs that are installed on the computer". Again, one is instructed / directed to search in the registry for the answer. The keys referenced in this article are HKLM\Software\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\vX.Y.Z, where X is a major version, Y is a minor version number, and Z is a "build" (or similar) number. For 1.1, and 2.0, that is. For 1.0, one is to check HKLM\Software\Microsoft\.NETFramework\Policy\v1.0 (like KB article 315291). To determine service pack levels, other registry values are checked.

Obviously, there are many different ways to do the same thing. But it would be nice if the MS KB was consistent. I think I prefer the method illustrated by "How to use Visual C++ .NET to detect the .NET Framework versions and service packs that are installed on the computer" because it seems the most straightforward - the registry value "Install" is set to 1 if the Framework version is installed, and the value "SP" is set to the level of the service pack of that version of the Framework that is installed. In this case, the .NET Framework 1.0 is a bit different, but it's pretty much a non-issue in my environment because we never officially released anything that ran on the .NET Framework 1.0.