Determining the CLR System Directory

Question

The MSDN article on the C# command-line compiler /lib switch specifies the following:-

The compiler searches for assembly references that are not fully qualified in the following order:

• Current working directory. This is the directory from which the compiler is invoked.

• The common language runtime system directory.

• Directories specified by /lib.

• Directories specified by the LIB environment variable.

How do you programmatically determine where the CLR runtime system directory is located on the system?

Answer 1

You might check HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft.NETFramework\InstallRoot to find the location of the .Net runtime.

You can access the registry using the Microsoft.Win32.Registry classes.

Answer 2

native export from mscoree.dll - GetCORSystemDirectory()