Completely lost with installing core runtime (dotnet 8)

[Lindsay-Mathieson]

Have the main installer sorted - does my desktop app and service

Want to have it optionally install the dotnet 8 desktop & asp.net runtime and for the life of me can't figure out where to start, I know it involves something to do with "bootstrapping" but all the docs/examples I find online are old, incomplete and seem to assume a lot of prior knowledge or are so massively complicated, installing exercising every feature that I can't decipher what is happening.

Can anyone point me to a simple working sample of say installing a dotnet 7 or 8 runtime before the main installer?

This simple command line does all that I want:

winget install --silent --accept-source-agreements --accept-package-agreements dotnet-desktop-8 aspnetcore-8

But I can't invoke it from the installer as that would nest the msiexec process.

Thanks.