Getting a list of installed applications on a Windows core server

In this blog I will review a few options using PowerShell, to get a list of all installed applications on a windows server core in a different version.

I guess that in case you are working with Windows server core versions you are missing the appiz.cpl (control panel shortcut), which allows you easily to check which applications are installed on your system.

Although the cpl shortcuts doesn’t work anymore, there are few old (but nice) shortcuts since Windows 2008 (!!!) that still works:

Commands and Tools for Managing Windows Server 2008 Server Core

Option #1: Querying the registry

The registry is the ultimate Windows’s data storage that contains everything.
Therefore it's an easy way to query all the installed applications by using the next command:

Get-ItemProperty -Path “HKLM:\Software\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*”, “HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*”, “HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*” -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue |where { $_.DisplayName -ne $null }

• In case you would like to get only specific information like the name of the applications and date of installation, you can use the next command

Get-ItemProperty -Path “HKLM:\Software\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*”, “HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*”, “HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*” -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue |where { $_.DisplayName -ne $null } | Select-Object DisplayName, DisplayVersion, InstallDate

Option #2: Querying using WMI

The WMI command-line (WMIC) utility provides a command-line interface for Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)
Although WMIC is deprecated, it still works on Windows Server 2025 Core!

So, to get a list of all the installed applications using WMIC, we can run the next command:

wmic product get name /value

You can also export the list of installed applications to a file, export to notepad and get the content:

wmic product get > list.txt ; notepad list.txt

Summery

Working with Windows server core sometimes keeps people away because they think that they cannot get as much information as they can get from a Windows server desktop edition.
There are many tweaks what can help us still getting all the benefits of Windows Core server (Security & Performance) and still get all the information and data from the system.
This blog is just a small and simple example to do it.