Many of the applications available online these days are designed using the Microsoft .NET framework. Microsoft .NET has many versions starting from version 1.0 that was introduced in 2001 to the latest version 4.5 and consequently some programs require one version while other programs need another version to run. If you want to find out which versions of .NET frameworks are installed on your PC, then you can follow these instructions.
- Press the Win + R hotkey, type %WinDir%Microsoft.NET and press Enter.
- This would open a folder on your hard disk. The folder opened should have a sub-folder Framework. If you are using 64-bit version of Windows, then you would also find another sub-folder Framework64.
- Open the Framework folder (or Framework64 if you are using 64-bit Windows). Here you find many sub-folders, the first two digits of the folder names of which identify the .NET Framework version. For example, if you see a sub-folder named v2.0.50727, then you have .NET version 2.0 installed on your PC.
- If you are looking forward to compiling your own .NET applications, then you should check for the presence of vbc.exe inside each of the version named folders. If vbc.exe does not exist in these folders, then you will have to download and install .NET Framework redistributable for that version.
If you do not want to do all this manually, then we have earlier written an article on how to find out the installed .NET framework versions in Windows using a program called .NET Version Detector.