More Win7 install issues for us old farts

Issues
#1

Whoa - went down a rabbit hole trying to install the Home Remote Designer on my Win7 PC. (after following the existing win7 install thread on this site which seemed to die last October)
Anyway,
Downloaded the msix bundle (never heard of that before as I have never used win10). That lead me to looking into what they are and found you can rename them to .zip and do an extract. Did that to a couple levels, first the msixbundle then the msix file.
Well, that extracted everything to a folder and then I tried running the exe. Got a message that that I needed to install more .NET files so responded to that prompt and got a dotnetupdate to run. Tried that and still getting that message whenever I run the homeremote executable. Kind of turned into a dead end.

Figured I try the msix install method and downloaded the msix core and installed it. After which, I tried double clicking the msix file again but some command prompt window opened, printed something and closed faster than I could read it.

Right clicked on the msix file to see properties and poked around there. tried the option to run in win7 compatibility mode and checked another box (run as admin I think). Well at least then I got a new readable window from the msix installer saying that the Homeremote installed failed as I needed a new certificate.

Looked that up on google which lead me down a deeper rabbit hole on windows powershell. Never used that before either! Progressed with that a bit to actually set the execution policy…

Ended up at:
Create a certificate for package signing - MSIX | Microsoft Docs where I followed the instructions to create my own certificate and typed that crazy long string in from the microsoft site and ended up with the following error in powershell:
OK, now I can’t copy and paste that huge error but it starts:
The term “New-SelfSignedCertificate” is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file…

Pretty much at the end of the line.
How come there isn’t just an old setup.exe file or something us old farts know how to use?
Any advice or other threads to check?
Thanks!

#2

Did you install the “.NET 6 Desktop Runtime” (x64 version)?

You’ll definitely need that if you haven’t already installed it. If you have that installed & it still isn’t working, then it’s possible the app is no longer compatible with Win 7. I haven’t attempted an install on Windows 7 in a while.

Lately, I’ve been referring new users to the version in the Microsoft Store. Here’s a link to that. You’ll need a Windows 10 machine though.

#3

Thanks much!
I had run [.NET 6.0 Desktop Runtime (v6.0.8) - Windows x64 Installer] but your advice prompted me to test if it actually installed. I searched on the web how to verify installation and the found instructions to look in the registry and that indicated only ver 4.0 was installed. There was another mention which said to type dotnet --version at the cmd prompt. I did that and got no result except for something regarding “no SDK modules found”. So then I assumed maybe I had to load ver 5.0 first. So I looked for that and there were several packages - the SDK, the Runtime, the Desktop Runtime,and the ASP Core Runtime. By chance I started with the SDK (due to the cmd prompt response) which installed all of them for ver 5.0. Ok - back to regedit and that says only 4.0 was installed. Tried the dotnet --version cmd again and got a response that 5.0x was installed!
Then I reran the 6.0 Desktop Runtime installer again. The cmd prompt still only reported 5.0x was installed.
I did not try running Home Remote then, but it may worked.
Instead, I downloaded the ver 6.04 SDK and installed that. Now the cmd prompt reported 6.08.
I tried the HR Designer .exe (which I manually extracted from the msix stuff) and it actually worked!

I am not familiar with .NET enough to know what the dotnet --version cmd actually reports the status of (runtime, desktop runtime, SDK, or ASP.NET), but could it be possible the HR Designer s/w requires more than .NET Desktop Runtime (subset)? I am very sure one of my very first failures of HR was after running the .NET v6.08 Desktop Runtime installer, which may have indeed installed the Desktop Runtime but no SDK modules were present at that time.

Anyway, I post this lengthy mess in the off chance someone else has similar failures as I did - if you don’t get success with the recommended install of the .NET v6.08 Desktop Runtime, try installing the complete package of all the runtimes and modules by installing the SDK 6.0.400 (which includes the 6.08 Desktop Runtime) available at Download .NET 6.0 (Linux, macOS, and Windows)

Thank you again for sending me down that rabbit hole ;), as your advice did get me running Designer at the end!