When working with a customer recently we needed to deploy the Azure Virtual Desktop client for Windows with Microsoft Intune but noticed an oddity that the MSI system-based installer was being detected by Intune as a user-based installer.  A bit of bingooglefoo on the Interwebs landed me at an article by Alex Durrant on the issue.  Alex was dealing with an older version before Microsoft renamed Windows Virtual Desktop to Azure Virtual Desktop, but the client installer is the same.

Understanding Alex’s approach of telling Intune that this is NOT a MSI based install when creating the .IntuneWin wrapper file led me to a simpler solution than bootstrapping the MSI with the PowerShell Application Deployment Toolkit, awesome as that is.

A simpler method is to tell IntuneWinAppUtil.exe that we are running a batch file, not an MSI.

The contents of the batch file is simple the command lines that need to be executed for the install and uninstall of the MSI.  However, this is just a placeholder or note, it isn’t actually used.

When setting up the Win32 app in Intune, the MSI properties will not be autodetected, but entering them manually works just fine.

For reference, here’s the commands and detection rule

Install command: msiexec.exe /i "RemoteDesktop_1.2.2459.0_x64.msi" /l*v "C:\Windows\Logs\Azure Virtual Desktop Windows client_1.2.2459.0_x64.log" /quiet ALLUSERS=1 
Uninstall command: msiexec.exe /x "{72E41EC7-55E9-4B2A-B5F4-961E0DA45913}" /l*v "C:\Windows\Logs\Azure Virtual Desktop Windows client_1.2.2459.0_x64_Uninstall.log" /quiet 
Detection rules: MSI {72E41EC7-55E9-4B2A-B5F4-961E0DA45913}

That’s it.  All of the goodness you expect without the fluff.