You may see, many software this day need .Net Framework to work properly. So, it will be best idea to check what .Net version you have on your machine before proceeding to installation. Now there are many ways to check what .Net version is installed on your system. Here I just try to share some of those.

Rob Villahermosa cover a great article on it. Here are those two methods shared by the blogger:

Method 1:

1. Under HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoft.NETFrameworkpolicy check to see if the version you want is installed (for example, look for the v1.1 folder and 4322 for the version number to detect the released version of V1.1)

2. Under HKLMSoftwareMicrosoft.NETFrameworkInstallRoot get the path where the Framework is installed. Create a directory string by concatenating the install root and the version under policy. E.g. “C:WINDOWSMicrosoft.NETFramework” + “v1.1″ + “.” + “4322″

3. Look at the directory, if mscorlib.dll (or another critical .dll to the .NET framework is there) the runtime is installed.

Method 2:

There’s a caveat to this method in that the shim gets left behind when we uninstall if there is more than one version of the CLR on the machine, but it still can be useful depending on what version you’re looking for:

LoadLibrary(“mscoree.dll”); – if this fails then there’s no runtime installed

GetProcAddress(“CorBindToRuntime”); – if this fails there’s no runtime installed

CorBindToRuntime(“GetRequestedRuntimeInfo”);

GetRequestedRuntimeInfo(xxxx); where xxxx is the build number.

If you don’t want to do above work then here is pretty nice tool named .NET Framework Detector which can do the work in single click.

Download .NET Framework Detector

So, what method you use when you need to detect .Net frame work?