Silverlight Installation Switches

David Tesar — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 01:55:00 GMT

Below is a list of all of the Silverlight 1, 2, and 3 installation switches available and their description. This will be included in the Silverlight Enterprise Deployment guide v2 which I’m writing - to be released soon. In the mean time, here they are for your assistance:

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 DRM Playback without requiring any end-user intervention. This setting is automatically included when the quiet install switch is used. By default, DRM Playback is set to prompt on 1st use.

/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 via a custom ADMX (see Silverlight Deployment Guide)

/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 2 (KB 960353 / 2.0.40115.0) or later.

Silverlight Enterprise Deployment Guide

David Tesar — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 01:53:00 GMT

This guide is intended for any organization who would like to deploy, manage, and troubleshoot Silverlight in their environment. Some of the things you can find in this guide are installation switches, update behavior, value proposition on why to deploy, group policy adm / admx / adml files, and instructions on how to deploy Silverlight via group policy & SMS.

Back in May of this year I was presented with a side project to work on by Tim Sneath for this guide. I accepted and it's great to have it finally released. I had help from our SMS team doing a test deployment to 60k machines using the document, documentation reviewed by a number of people, and of course help from the Silverlight product team.

As an FYI - Efforts were made to create an MSI of Silverlight which could be deployed via group policy in addition to the script method, but there were challenges with this based on the way Silverlight inherently installs. The Silverlight EXE extracts into an MSI and MSP file - both of which are required to install in order for Silverlight to function. So if we gave you this version of the MSI, you'd have to go back and install the MSP separately after the MSI install (yuck). In trying to package the exe into an MSI, you can't have two MSI files trying to install at the same time - so this doesn't work either.

At any rate, the guide still shows you how to install Silverlight via group policy using the provided script. Each group policy method (MSI and script) have advantages and disadvantages; the script method should be sufficient for most organizations. In the future, there will be more installation/upgrade options and updated versions of the guide. Future availability of a MSI package for group policy deployment is uknown at this time.

So please, download here and feel free to provide feedback.

Important Updates:
1) Many people seem to overlook the "important" notice on page 20 to answer the concerns about the HKCU registry settings for UpdateMode. We intentionally did not create an ADM(X) template for this reason. You should not be using this to control the setting because users can manually override this. In the guide it states:
"The Silverlight control’s Automatic Update policy can be set per-user or per-machine. If an administrator sets a per-machine setting, then this overrides the per-user setting. We recommend that you manage Silverlight by using the Administrative Template settings in Group Policy whenever possible because these settings are always written to a secure per-machine key in the registry. This means that users cannot change settings by using the Silverlight user interface or by modifying the per-user update mode registry key."

2) As for the problems with importing the ADM(X) templates, errors will occur if the ADMX file is saved with any other name than SL_PARAMS.admx. You will get the error as follows:
"Expected one of the following possible element(s), <target>,but found <using> instead.
File C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions\name.admx line3. column 69"

To fix this, save the file as SL_PARAMS.admx (matches to <target prefix> syntax under %systemroot%\PolicyDefinition).

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Silverlight Installation Switches

Silverlight Enterprise Deployment Guide