You wrote your .NET program, that can be used as stand alone portable application (such as it should be for SMART Client Apps), however you have to be sure, that necessary prerequisites (such as .NET framework) are installed on client’s machine. What to do? How to Detect .NET framework version installed on target machine before running .NET application. The answer is – to use unmanaged C++ bootstrapper, that invoke your application if correct version of framework is installed.
All of those .NET versions are detectible by queering specific registry keys. However, in some cases, you need to load mscoree.dll and call “GETCOREVERSION” API to determine whether specific version of .NET is installed. You can read more about it in MSDN.
So it’s really simple to write small C++ application (or PowerShell applet), that queries registry and invoke your managed application. How to do this? You can either read about it in outstanding blog of Aaron Stebner, who is Project Manager in XNA platform deployment team or attend my session next week to learn do it yourself. We’ll speak about nifty ways to do it also.
Anyway, by now, you can use small stand alone program, I wrote a while ago, that will tell you all versions of .NET frameworks installed in target machine without any prerequisites. It can be run even from shared network location
