I had to install WMF 3.0 on one of my Server 2008 R2 machines, a pre-requisite to which is that the machine must have .NET 4.0 (standalone installer here, Server Core installer here). So how do I find whether my machine has .NET 4.0? Simple – there’s a registry key you can check. See this link for more details. Very quickly, in my case, since I only want to see whether .NET 4.0 is present or not, the following command will suffice:
reg query "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP"
In my case .NET 4.0 was not installed:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\v2.0.50727 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\v3.0 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\v3.5
By the way if you try installing WMF 3.0 without .NET 4.0 present, you’ll get an not so helpful error “The update is not applicable to your computer.”