Thursday, February 23, 2017

Installing SharePoint 2013 on Windows 2012 R2 with .NET 4.6.1

I ran into an issue today whereby my SharePoint installer would crash after all of the prerequisites were installed and I tried to run setup.exe. After delving a little deeper I found the article https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3087184/sharepoint-2013-or-project-server-2013-setup-error-if-the-.net-framework-4.6-is-installed.

Microsoft's original response to this problem was to postpone the installation of .NET 4.6.1 until after you've installed SharePoint - well that doesn't help me when the server image already has it baked in.
Then Microsoft came out with a fix, which required a DLL file to be copied into the updates directory of the installation media (i.e. copy everything to a local directory, then copy in the dll file). See https://download.microsoft.com/download/3/6/2/362c4a9c-4afe-425e-825f-369d34d64f4e/svrsetup_15-0-4709-1000_x64.zip for SharePoint 2013 patch file.

In my case it still wasn't working, but I later discovered that it was because I was also trying to slipstream a Cumulative Update into the installation (which I normally do to speed up the installation process and remove the need for multiple PSConfig operations).

So the morale to the story - if you want to use this fix, you can't slipstream any updates into the installation also.

FYI, to find out what version of .NET is actually installed on a Windows 2012 Server, follow the steps at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh925568%28v=vs.110%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396#net_d.