What is the best way for a WinForms application to determine exactly which Windows operating system it is running on?

Question

I have a WinForms application that needs to behave in specific ways (specifically shell to a certain installer) based on the operating system on which it is running.

I am using the System.OperatingSystem class, and combining the PlatFormID, Major, Minor and Build numbers which gets you most of the way there.

Unfortunately, the properites of an OperatinSystem object, do not allow you to distinguish precisely between some platforms. E.g. Vista and Windows Server 2008, or Vista 32 bit and Vista 64 bit. Likewise, XP 64 bit Professional seems to have the same versioning info as Server 2003.

So is it possible to determine exactly which Windows operating system you are running on, from a WinForms App (using c#)?

Answer 1

The easiest way to distinguish between 32bit and 64bit is through environmental variable PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE.

string value = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE");

if you run this code on 32bit Windows, value will be either "x86" or empty. On 64bit Windows I assume it will be set to anything but "x86". Kind of messy but so far it works on all versions of Windows where you can execute .NET program.

You can also use more modern WMI to query practically all information about operating system you can imagine but this will only work on Windows 2000 or newer. If you can live with that, check this blog post for some examples.

Answer 2

This was something i did about a year ago for a legacy app at my company... I don't know that it is the most current method, but it certainly worked.

If Environment.OSVersion.Platform = PlatformID.Win32NT Then
        If major <= 4 Then
            ret = "Windows NT 4.0"
            _usingNT4 = True
        ElseIf major > 6 Then
            ret = "Windows Vista"
        ElseIf major = 5 And minor = 0 Then
            ret = "Windows 2000"
        Else
            ret = "Windows XP"
        End If
    Else
        If major > 4 Or (major = 4 And minor >= 90) Then
            ret = "Windows ME"
        ElseIf (major = 4 And minor >= 10 And minor < 90) Then
            ret = "Windows 98"
        Else
            ret = "Windows 95"
        End If
    End If

Answer 3

If you really need all the details, I guess you still can use the good-old GetVersionEx of Win32 API.

In fact this is not .NET (strictly speaking), but usable in a .NET application. See here.

Answer 4

You can use WMI to retrieve information for the Win32_OperatingSystem management class.

Code generated with WMI Code Creator :

using System;
using System.Management;
using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace WMISample
{
    public class MyWMIQuery
    {
        public static void Main()
        {
            try
            {
                ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = 
                    new ManagementObjectSearcher("root\\CIMV2", 
                    "SELECT * FROM Win32_OperatingSystem"); 

                foreach (ManagementObject queryObj in searcher.Get())
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("-----------------------------------");
                    Console.WriteLine("Win32_OperatingSystem instance");
                    Console.WriteLine("-----------------------------------");
                    Console.WriteLine("BuildNumber: {0}", queryObj["BuildNumber"]);
                    Console.WriteLine("Caption: {0}", queryObj["Caption"]);
                    Console.WriteLine("OSArchitecture: {0}", queryObj["OSArchitecture"]);
                    Console.WriteLine("OSLanguage: {0}", queryObj["OSLanguage"]);
                    Console.WriteLine("Version: {0}", queryObj["Version"]);
                }
            }
            catch (ManagementException e)
            {
                MessageBox.Show("An error occurred while querying for WMI data: " + e.Message);
            }
        }
    }
}

Answer 5

Here's a simpler way:

string os = Environment.OSVersion.VersionString;

... For my OS, the above returns the following:

Microsoft Windows NT 6.1.7600.0

Hope this helps.