Most reliable way to find the visual studio executable?

Question

Assuming I want the newest flavour of visualstudio that is able to open C# projects, and if there are multiple (pro/express), I'd like to open pro.

edit: I want my own program to open visual studio on the computer of my program's user.

Answer 1

Is this the sort of thing that would be changing with great frequency? If not, I'd just do a search on your PC for "devenv.exe" (the VS executable) and then associate *.cs, *.csproj, *.sln, etc. files to open automatically with the "newest flavor" found that you want to use.

Edit: You could try having your program check the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio registry entry and retrieve the latest version from there, then have your program open the file using the Visual Studio executable at the appropriate location.

Answer 2

There isn't one API available that will simply open the latest version of Visual Studio. This is especially true when you start to consider the impact of expression versions of Visual Studio (and the ones which can open C# projects).

I think you're best bet is to simply create a list of Visual Studio versions that you care about in priority order. Then enumerate them in your process checking for the first one that is available and launching that process.

The most reliable way to find the installed location of Visual Studio is to examine the InstallDir key inside of

• 32 Bit: HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio{VersionNumber}
• 64 Bit: HKLM:\Softawre\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio{VersionNumber}