Installing .NET runtime as a prerequisite for MDM silent installations

In order to avoid causing installation errors, Devolutions does not package the .NET runtime inside Remote Desktop Manager's installer, but rather allows it to download and install the runtime as a prerequisite if needed.

Here are the instructions to follow and the background operations related to the .NET runtime installation:

  • The feature is currently only available by appending the INSTALL_DOTNET_RUNTIME="1" parameter to the msiexec command.
  • Although this does not seem like a problem for InTune or other MDMs, interactive installations can encounter errors when the installer is run without administrator privileges.
  • The installation then checks for any compatible version of the .NET 8 Windows Desktop Runtime, and stops looking if it finds one already installed.
  • If no compatible runtime is found, an attempt is made to obtain the download link for the latest version from Microsoft. Should this fail, a statically configured version is installed instead.
  • The runtime installer is downloaded to a temporary location from Microsoft's CDN and is executed.

Failure to install the runtime does not cause Remote Desktop Manager installation to fail. Furthermore, the runtime installation has a 3 minutes limit preventing hanging the installation for too long in case of a slow network link or other issues related to connectivity.

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