Thoughts.exe

With Windows Vista getting popular and Windows 7 fast approaching there will soon be a lot of applications running on these platform. Some of the scenarios need to read the OS name dynamically from code. The commonly used method is to extract the OS name using System.OperatingSystem object. It provides a Platform and version number using which you can deduce the OS name.

I have done the same here and added the Version checks for Windows Vista and Windows 7. Windows Vista and Windows 7 come under the Win32NT platform.

Windows Vista has Major version number 6 and minor version number as 0.

Windows 7 has Major version number 6 and minor version number as 1.

And here is the routine,

public string GetOpertatingSystemName()
{
    System.OperatingSystem os = System.Environment.OSVersion;
    string name = "Unknown";

    switch (os.Platform)
    {
        case System.PlatformID.Win32Windows:
            switch (os.Version.Minor)
            {
                case 0:
                    name = "Windows 95";
                    break;

                case 10:
                    name = "Windows 98";
                    break;

                case 90:
                    name = "Windows ME";
                    break;
            }
            break;

        case System.PlatformID.Win32NT:
            switch (os.Version.Major)
            {
                case 3:
                    name = "Windws NT 3.51";
                    break;

                case 4:
                    name = "Windows NT 4";
                    break;

                case 5:
                    switch (os.Version.Minor)
                    {
                        case 0:
                            name = "Windows 2000";
                            break;
                        case 1:
                            name = "Windows XP";
                            break;
                        case 2:
                            name = "Windows Server 2003";
                            break;
                    }
                    break;

                case 6:
                    switch (os.Version.Minor)
                    {
                        case 0:
                            name = "Windows Vista";
                            break;
                        case 1:
                            name = "Windows 7";
                            break;
                    }
                    break;
            }
            break;
    }

    return name;
}

Thanks to this article on CodeGuru for the version information.

Have fun.

Tags: .Net, C#

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 6:19 am and is filed under .Net, C#, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.