Why Is There No MSI Installer for Rhino?

The Rhino installer, Rhino.exe, checks your system for the correct versions of the .NET Framework, .NET Core, and the Microsoft C runtimes, and downloads and installs them as needed. It also installs four MSI files for the Rhino product itself and makes sure compatible versions of those MSIs are installed.

The version requirements for these prerequisites and compatible Rhino modules are not published or maintained anywhere outside the Rhino installer itself. This makes it nearly impossible to install Rhino without the EXE installer.

Microsoft doesn’t support shipping commercial applications that use these frameworks as an MSI. It did about 15 years ago, but found the method unreliable and has since discontinued support for it.

SCCM and Intune both support EXE installations. See the documentation for each to deploy Rhino.