What's the best way to detect the presence of SMO?

Question

I have some code that uses SMO to populate a list of available SQL Servers and databases. While we no longer support SQL Server 2000, it's possible that the code could get run on a machine that SQL Server 2000 and not have the SMO library installed. I would perfer to check for SMO first and degrade the functionality gracefully instead of blowing up in the user's face. What is best way to detect whether or not SMO is available on a machine?

Every example that I have seen through a quick Google scan was a variation of "look for C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\SDK\Assemblies\Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo.dll". The problem with that approach is that it only works with SQL Server 2005. If SQL Server 2008 is the only SQL Server installed then the path will be different.

Answer 1

This is kind of clunky, but a quick check of the registry seems to work. Under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, a large number of classes from the SMO assemblies will be registered. All I needed to do was to pick one of the SMO classes and check for the existence of the key with the same name. The following function will return true if SMO has been installed, false if otherwise.

private bool CheckForSmo()
{
    string RegKeyName = @"Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Database";
    bool result = false;
    Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey hkcr = Microsoft.Win32.Registry.ClassesRoot.OpenSubKey(RegKeyName);
    result = hkcr != null;

    if (hkcr != null)
    {
        hkcr.Close();
    }

    return result;
}

Answer 2

What I do is just try to create an instance of some SMO object. If it fails, its not there.