PowerShell ISE on Windows Server 2008 – what version of .NET is required?

After installing the Windows Management Framework, a.k.a PowerShell 2.0, on my test Windows 2008 64 bit Server I fired up the new PowerShell ISE tool and was prompted with this error:

I already knew that PowerShell ISE had a higher dependency on .NET than PowerShell itself which only requires .NET 2.0, however I was curious about the statement in the above message which states:

“If you are running Windows Server 2008, you must use Server Manager to install or configure “.NET Framework 3.5.1″

I knew on my test Windows Server 2008 box that in Server Manager I only had the option to install .NET Framework 3.0, not 3.5.1.

Anyway, I duly installed .NET 3.0 through Server Manager to see what the effect would be on PowerShell ISE.

After the successful installation of .NET 3.0 I fired up the very useful tool ASoft .NET Version Detector 2007 to confirm what versions of of .NET where installed on the machine. (I had already checked in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET , but ran this tool just to make doubly sure I wasn’t missing something.)

So I had .NET 2.0 SP2 and 3.0, but not 3.5.1. I fired up PowerShell ISE and low and behold it opened.

So my question is does PowerShell ISE require .NET 3.5.1 or only .NET 3.0? Answers on a postcard or comments on the blog please!

Update:

Thanks to Aleksandar who pointed out that the answer is in PowerShell help itself and that only .NET 3.0 is required.

Get-Help about_Windows_PowerShell_ISE

So it would appear that the error message in Windows Server 2008 at the top of this post is slightly misleading………