Silent install of .Net Framework
Most installers give you the opportunity to perform unattended or silent installs. This is exactly what I needed to do with Microsoft .Net Framework version 2.0. There is helpfully a switch (/q) which should install quietly, however when trying this you are immediately prompted with a user inteface! After some digging around I came across a useful article that showed just how to do this.
In order to truly hide all dialogs you can use “/q:a” to specify administrator mode which will hide all dialogs. This alone is not enough becuase you would be immediately prompted with the location in which to store the extracted files. So you can then specify “/c:<location>” as the name of the path and name of the setup file. Finally you will want to add the /q onto this to ensure that the setup is run silently thus hiding all dialogs and giving you a completely silent install. That was simple wasn’t it… The final command looks like:
dotnetfx.exe /q:a /c:”setup.exe /q”
This also works with other microsoft products, such as Windows Installer 3.1
Some useful articles:
