Today I came across a discussion that is going on in MSDN Forums on the topic “How to check for a Microsoft Hot Fix in the client system and install if it is not installed in it?”. After going through the threads and reading few articles on this, I would like to share a quick work-around for this problem which might help someone who is facing the same problem.
Briefly, the solution is to create a bootstrapper package for the required Hot Fix and use it as prerequisite in the Setup Project
We can create the bootstrapper using a tool called “Bootstrapper Manifest Generator” (BMG). This can be downloaded (free) from the following location.
We can check registry to confirm whether the Hot Fix is installed or not. We need to set several Bypass-if conditions to make sure that we install the Hot Fix only when it is particular version of OS and the Hot Fix has not been installed.
* Usually Hot Fixes are Operating System specific
Here are some useful links related to this topic.
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-us/winformssetup/thread/58E75C92-4689-487E-9FF7-8835246B82FA
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsto/thread/a4e2a6af-c3ea-4b7a-9348-7dfa6a6164dd
