.NET 3.5 SP1 Weirdness on Windows 7

Posted on January 21, 2010 by

I discovered a quirk today related to  Windows 7 and .NET 3.5 SP1.  I�m classifying it as a �quirk� and not a �feature� since it was fixable <grin>, but since it took me several hours over several days to slog through it, I will hopefully save you the time that you could otherwise spend with your significant other, watching your favorite movie, or indulging in your favorite comfort food.

Goal:  Install the Windows Azure SDK and Tools for Visual Studio 2008

Error:  .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 is required, but not installed

azure

Here�s the weird part:  I�m running Windows 7 Enterprise Edition, fully patched, and everything in Add/Remove Windows Components related to .NET is selected:

addremove

I also verified this during the install of the Azure tools in the Web Platform Installer

Untitled picture

Just for fun, I decided to try running the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installer, but received the following error message:

error

Harumph.  After hours of searching on the web, including every search engine I could think of, and s a last ditch effort, I decided to swallow my troubleshooting pride send a mail to one of our internal mailing lists.  As a side note, I really hate sending mail to that alias for 2 reasons:  first, too many people abuse that list and send questions without even trying to look for an answer and I didn�t want to look like one of those, and second I was betting the solution was so simple that nobody had blogged about it for reasons obvious to everyone but me.

The answer came within 10 minutes from Wade Wegner:

image

Since Twitter doesn�t keep tweets in the search results for very long, the tweets didn�t turn up in my searches.  I tried Wade�s suggestion and it worked. 

SO

If you run into this problem (or I do again and don�t remember the pitifully simple solution) it�s here for everyone that wants to learn from my pain.  Turns out this problem will affect ANY installation that has a dependency set on 3.5 SP1.  I�m not sure what the cause of this problem was, but I hope it doesn�t happen again.

  • Joe

    Just guessing, but… since your Azure Tools snippet shows .NET 3.5 SP1 and .NET 4 Beta 2, is it possible that .NET 4 Beta 2 install changed a value or setting that was then interpreted as incorrect by the Azure installer? If so, that value or setting may have been overwritten (correctly) by turning .NET 3.5 SP1 off and back on.

    • http://chriskoenig.net Chris Koenig

      Thank you very much for your email. I am currently out of the office at the annual MVP summit. During this time I will have limited access to email. If your need is urgent, feel free to call me on my cell phone at 214-385-5616, and I will get to your email as soon as I can.
      Thanks!
      Chris

  • Joe

    Just guessing, but… since your Azure Tools snippet shows .NET 3.5 SP1 and .NET 4 Beta 2, is it possible that .NET 4 Beta 2 install changed a value or setting that was then interpreted as incorrect by the Azure installer? If so, that value or setting may have been overwritten (correctly) by turning .NET 3.5 SP1 off and back on.