Microsoft Silverlight 5.1.30514.0

Resources:

Download Silverlight microsoft.com/getsilverlight

Silverlight Deployment Guide: http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/D/5/CD5AAAE3-21F7-47A8-B7D5-39E36BAF9AC8/Silverlight_Deployment_Guide.docx

Recipe:

My main issue with Silverlight is that I didn't want any sort of Auto-Update to be on, which as many of you probably know, it’s on by default. There are some registry entries you can edit, which my first thought was to extract the MSI from the EXE. However, I did come across the Silverlight Deployment Guide written by David Tesar and edited by Nick Kramer from Microsoft.

The guide describes all system, requirements and deployment methods available to you. After giving it a read I decided that I would use their method of installation switches with the EXE. Here are the switches listed in the Guide:

Installation Switches:

The Silverlight install executable file has a number of different switches to customize the installation.  The syntax of the setup file is as follows:

Silverlight<version>.exe

/q = quiet install or upgrade.  This installs or upgrades Silverlight without seeing the GUI.  When Silverlight is installed quietly, by default privacy related features such as DRM protected media playback and the Silverlight auto-update feature will be configured to prompt the user for permission on 1^st use of the respective features. The Silverlight auto-update feature requires administrative rights so non-admin users will not be prompted.

/doNotRequireDRMPrompt = turns off the 1st use prompt allowing content protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) to play without requiring any end-user intervention.    When Silverlight is installed quietly, DRM Playback is set to prompt on 1st use by default.

/ignorewarnings = non-fatal warnings will not be reflected in the quiet installer return code but will instead return zero indicating success.  This is useful if in testing or custom installation software requires a zero return code.

/noupdate = disables the Silverlight internal auto-updater. The Silverlight auto-updater requires administrative rights, so in environments where users have admin rights this switch may be used to prevent administrative users from being prompted to install updates if you want to control when updates to Silverlight are distributed.  Group policy can also be used to implement this setting – see Managing Silverlight Settings through Group Policy in this document for more information.

/qu = quiet uninstall. This uninstalls Silverlight without seeing the GUI. Note: This will only uninstall the exact same version that it installed, so is typically only useful for testing scenarios.

Note: The /doNotRequireDRMPrompt and /ignorewarnings switches are only available with the version of Silverlight 2 GDR 1 (KB  960353 / 2.0.40115.0) or later.

Silverlight Setup performs the following tasks:

- Pre-requisite check (see Installation Requirements in this document)

- Ensure a later version isn’t installed

- Uninstall previously installed version if present

- Install the product

    - Write Silverlight registry keys

    - Create files in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Silverlight\

Deployment:

Looking at this, I had a go at the following command:

Silverlight.exe /q /doNotRequireDRMPrompt /noupdate

Testing:

The deployment came back as successful, and I also went to a website which requires Silverlight to do a quick test, and also look at the Microsoft Silverlight Configuration. On the Updates tab it doesn't actually have anything ticked, not even the “Never check for updates” but everything is just greyed out instead, personally I wouldn't mind the never check to be ticked.  

I also noticed that it did indeed remove the previous version already on the test machine without any issues.

Logs:

If you have any issues the installer creates two log files, Silverlight0.log and SilverlightMSI.log which are created in your %TEMP% variable. 

If you download Silverlight from a x64 computer you will get "Silverlight_x64.exe"

I had to go to a 32bit computer to be able to download the 32bit version of Silverlight (Silverlight.exe).

No need to mess around with msi file for this one...exe works fine with the /q switch.

To disable Silverlight Updates on 64 bit machines, just add/edit this registery input

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Silverlight]

"UpdateConsentMode"=dword:00000000

"UpdateMode"=dword:00000002

I just ran the exe with silent switch and then added these keys..

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Silverlight]
"UpdateConsentMode"=dword:00000000
"UpdateMode"=dword:00000000

Also had a bit of fun with x86 and x64, you cant have both. I guess that depends on your default browser but x86 install on x64 seems the best way to go in an organisation.