VersionNT MSI property on Windows 10

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Here’s my two cents….

I don’t find the VersionNT property terribly useful. VersionNT64 is: VersionNT64 …. Not VersionNT64 to determine bitness.

This is a bit of a hack (they do this, we do that…) but desperate times call for desperate measures….

In all of the compatibility games MSFT is playing they only seem to be masking the Major and Minor but Build and revision. I’ve also worked out that on Win8 they mask it as 6.2 and on Win 10 they mask it as 6.3. So therefore I feel comfortable doing this:

<Property Id="WIN10FOUND">
  <DirectorySearch Id="searchSystem" Path="[SystemFolder]" Depth="0">
    <FileSearch Id="searchFile" Name="advapi32.dll" MinVersion="6.3.10000.0"/>
  </DirectorySearch>
</Property>

What I tend to do ask myself is “WHY” do I need Windows (FOO)? I then look for some registry entry or DLL that indicates that particular feature, component, API is present and use that for my test.

Microsoft has adopted an evergreen approach of “you don’t need to know what version it is, you’ll always have the latest and it’ll always be called Windows 10” and to me this reinforces the approach I prefer to take. I know that a day will come that they are wrong and I do need to know otherwise I’ll install and my application will fail and my users will complain and not know what version they have. (Sigh…)

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