Microsoft introduced .NET software framework for developing application for Windows platform more than two decades ago. Since then many versions of .NET have been released by Microsoft. On a modern PC, you are not really going to use very old and dated versions of .NET such as version 1.1 or 2.0.
However, when installing a new application, we might come across an error that the application requires a newer version of the .NET framework runtimes. In those cases, we have to download the required files from https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet.
Find .NET versions installed
In order to find which versions of the .NET runtimes are installed on your Windows PC and which are needed, you can use an application called .NET Checker. After launching this application, all we have to do is click on the button labeled Check Installed. It will populate the listbox with the .NET versions installed. It will display the versions that are not installed in the red color.
Find Visual C++ runtime versions installed
In addition to checking for the .NET versions, it can also check for the Visual C++ Runtime versions installed. For this, we have to click on the button labeled Check Installed displayed about the VC++ runtimes list. If a version is missing then you can download it from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/windows/latest-supported-vc-redist.
Find which versions are needed to run a program
There is another feature offered by the .NET Checker tool. It can tell you which version of .NET runtimes an application (designed using .NET framework) requires. For this, we can click on the button labeled Check Required and then select the EXE file in question. It will then show you the filename, the .NET version required by it in order to run and the .NET version available on your Windows PC.
Conclusion
.NET Checker is a very useful tool for Windows users. Instead of blindly installing all the .NET runtimes, we can use it to find which version is actually needed. This can save us a lot of frustration and wasted time.
You can download .NET Checker from https://www.pcassistsoftware.co.uk/free.html.