Detect and require a Windows QFE/patch for during installation

.net, c#, windows, windows-installer, wix

Solution

`Win32_QuickFixEngineering` won't return all updates. Actually, it returns only updates restricted to QFE:

Updates supplied by Microsoft Windows Installer (MSI) or the Windows update site (http://update.microsoft.com) are not returned by Win32_QuickFixEngineering.

The update you're after is an MSI patch. Use `Microsoft.Deployment.WindowsInstaller` (aka DTF - Deployment Tools Foundation, part of the WiX toolset) to query the applied MSI patches:

public static bool IsPatchAlreadyInstalled(string productCode, string patchCode)
{
    var patches = 
        PatchInstallation.GetPatches(null, productCode, null, UserContexts.Machine, PatchStates.Applied);

    return patches.Any(patch => patch.DisplayName == patchCode);
}

In this case, KB2468871 is one of .NET Framework 4 updates. The following will return true if the updates have been applied on the machine:

IsPatchAlreadyInstalled("{F5B09CFD-F0B2-36AF-8DF4-1DF6B63FC7B4}", "KB2468871");// .NET Framework 4 Client Profile 64-bit
IsPatchAlreadyInstalled("{8E34682C-8118-31F1-BC4C-98CD9675E1C2}", "KB2468871");// .NET Framework 4 Extended 64-bit
IsPatchAlreadyInstalled("{3C3901C5-3455-3E0A-A214-0B093A5070A6}", "KB2468871");// .NET Framework 4 Client Profile 32-bit
IsPatchAlreadyInstalled("{0A0CADCF-78DA-33C4-A350-CD51849B9702}", "KB2468871");// .NET Framework 4 Extended 32-bit

Problem

Our WiX installer deploys a .NET 4.0 WinForms application to Windows Vista and 7 desktops. The application includes a Portable Class Library that requires a .NET patch (KB2468871). We need to install the patch as a prerequisite. There are various ways that the patch can be applied: - Download the KB2468871 patch and install it - Install the Portable Library Tools - As a prerequisite using ClickOnce (might be a variation of #1) Using advice from a similar question, I created a `CustomAction` to check for the QFE (#1) that I demonstrated returns true when found. ``` private static bool IsPatchAlreadyInstalled() { // If the patch is installed, we can find it using WMI var query = new SelectQuery("SELECT HotFixID FROM Win32_QuickFixEngineering WHERE HotFixID = 'Q2468871' OR HotFixID = 'KB2468871'"); var results = new ManagementObjectSearcher(query).Get(); return results.Count > 0; } ``` Unfortunately, this fails on my dev machine as the patch was installed as part of the Tools (#2). I haven't witnessed situation #3 yet. What is a better way to detect if the patch has been applied?

Original source