December 2022"s Patch Tuesday (KB5022083) packed a security update for .NET and .NET Framework, changing how Windows Presentation Foundation-based (WPF) applications render XPS documents.
This caused many users to experience issues as XPS documents which leverage structural elements like tables and hyperlinks will not display correctly in WPF-based readers. Moreover, some inline images may not display correctly in XPS documents or throw Null reference exceptions in WPF-based readers.
Although Microsoft issued a couple of temporary workarounds involving PowerShell scripts and Windows registry configurations, the company has now rolled out a more permanent fix through an out-of-band (OOB) update.
The OOB update is now available for the following platforms:
- Windows 11 version 22H2
- Windows 11 version 21H2
- Windows Server 2022
- Azure Stack HCI version 22H2
- Azure Stack HCI version 21H2
- Windows 10 version 22H2
- Windows 10 version 21H2
- Windows 10 version 20H2
- Windows 10 version 1809
- Windows Server 2019
- Windows 10 version 1607
- Windows Server 2016
It is important to understand that this OOB update is not being delivered through Windows Update. As such, if you want to install it, you should navigate to the Microsoft Update Catalog and search for the various KB numbers mentioned in Microsoft"s support document.
Now that this permanent fix is available, you can also revert any temporary workarounds you may have applied as they are no longer needed.