I have been using Windows 8 for last few months. When Windows 8 CP
released I installed CP & subsequently RP too. When I wanted to
install some 3rd party application in my Windows 8 VM, I realized that
these applications require .NET Framework 2.0 or 3.0 in few cases.
Apparently my virtual machine does not have internet connection.
Obviously the first step for us is to check the
Program and Features to enable any available additional features in an Operating System. This is what you see in your
Control Panel –>
Program and Features. Click on
Turn Windows features on or off.
Here you can see .NET Framework as a feature and by default the
feature is disabled. You can enable this particular right away using
this GUI Tool but in order to do that you need to be connected to
internet i.e.
Online Mode. Other way is using
DISM Command and this can be done in an
Offline Mode using Windows 8 installation media.
Let’s see these 2 methods.
Method 1: When you are Online, connected to Internet.
In order to install the following window click on the
.NET Framework 3.5 (included .NET 2.0 and 3.0) select it & click
OK

Now, it will download the entire package from the internet & install the .NET Framework feature.
Method 2: When you are Offline and not connected to Internet
If you open CMD.EXE with Administrative Privileges i.e. at elevated level & run the this DISM command
dism /online /get-features you will see that from the State that .NET Framework is not part of the Operating System.

So the first thing you need to do is to copy the required package to
local machine before you run the command to install .NET Framework. To
do that use Windows 8 ISO/DVD/USB Media. You need to copy
SXS folder to local machine located at
D:\sources\sxs (In this case
D: your drive letter on which you have loaded Windows 8 Media)

You can also use the following command to copy this folder locally.
xcopy d:\sxs\*.* c:\sxs /s
Once completed, in order to install this feature you can run the following command
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3 /All /Source:C:\sxs /LimitAccess and hit Enter

After completing the installation of .NET Framework 3.5 you can see that the feature is enabled in the
Control Panel –>
Program and Features
