A look through a number of my blogs would give the impression I am none to fond of the ConfigMgr 2012 Application model 🙂

Whilst I accept its positives the negatives are also there for all to see.

Now to the point in hand.

If you are attempting to install an Application which by all accounts appears to be installing but the below error in Software Center displays:

This error essentially is ConfigMgr 2012’s way of telling you that although the application installed successfully, it is however unable to validate the detection method successfully resulting in the failure. More evidence is shown in Appenforce.log

To remediate the issue you will need to find a detection method that is acceptable. This mainly affects NON-MSI based products and in my example RSAT for 8.1 and Server 2012 is installed via an MSU so I need to find a better way than my first attempt ( A Registry Key 🙂 )to get this operational.

For this Example I used the Software Distribution path in C:\Windows as my validation but if you imprint your machine after an install this would also be a viable option to pick up the install.

There are many many ways to achieve the above but the scenario where I find this fits in most is with ConfigMgr 2012’s new Application model which while it has its pro’s it certainly has a long way to go in order to completely replace the packages.

The main issue I have seen on client sites has been around their use in a Task Sequence after a reboot. After the restart the machine comes online again and the agent re-establishes a connection. Particularly on machines with an SSD drive, everything happens very quickly and sometimes the build end up failing with a (405) error which is simply the Task Sequence trying to run before it can walk so to speak.

To allow it time to get up to speed a pause works great. The disadvantage of using a script is its yet another package which if it has an issue with not communicating another package will likely hit the same issue.

This is a simple command line step utilizing PING which is right out of the box 🙂

Simply create and amend as you wish but 1 minute is usually more than enough