While preparing to deploy an internal application I started to wonder if all of the workstations were properly configured – after a quick search I found a number of methods for detecting the .NET framework locally, but I didn’t find any clean options that worked remotely.

Thankfully I found a post with a few detection methods, one of which was using WMI from VBScript – which gave me the inspiration I needed:

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\CIMV2")
Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery( _
    "SELECT * FROM Win32_Product WHERE Caption LIKE '%.NET Framework 4%'",,48)
For Each objItem in colItems
    Wscript.Echo "Caption: " & objItem.Caption
Next

I pulled up LINQPad and whipped up a quick script to check for both the Client Profile and full (extended) version on a list of computers. Hopefully it’ll be of some use others.

void Main()
{
  //read the list of computrers to hit from computers.txt
  var path = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("USERPROFILE"),
    @"Desktop\computers.txt");
  var computers = File.ReadAllLines(path);
  
  //use a parallel searh as this process is quite slow
  Parallel.ForEach (computers.Where(s => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(s)), comp =>
  {
    try
    {
      bool extended = false;
      bool client = false;

      var search = new ManagementObjectSearcher(string.Format(@"\\{0}\root\cimv2", comp),
        "SELECT * FROM Win32_Product WHERE " +
        "Caption = 'Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile' " +
        "OR Caption = 'Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Extended'");

      foreach (ManagementObject res in search.Get())
      {
        if (res.Properties["Name"].Value.ToString() == "Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile")
          client = true;

        if (res.Properties["Name"].Value.ToString() == "Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Extended")
          extended = true;
      }

      Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0}: Client: {1}; Extended: {2}", comp, client, extended));
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
      Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0}: Failed ({1})", comp, ex.Message));
    }
  });
}

One thing to note, is that you do need Administrator permissions on the remote workstations.