Question

I want to take advantage of the new Windows 7 taskbar functionality in a .NET application and would like to know what people think is the best way to check for Windows 7 features in .NET. My aim is to have distinct code for Windows XP and Windows 7.

I’m not overally keen on:

• just wrapping the Windows 7 code in a try catch
• if OS = “Windows 7” Then…

Unless of course this is what most are doing. I really have hunted everywhere for a good approach but without success. The Microsoft unmanaged code wrapper library seems to just assume it’s running on Windows 7…

Answer 1

I think there’s nothing wrong with if OS = "Windows 7“. Of course,

• it should be if OS >= "Windows 7" (so that it doesn’t break in Windows 7.1 or whatever will be the successor) and
• it should be done by checking Environment.OSVersion (Platform and >= Version).

If you don’t want to clutter your code with if (isWindows7) {...}, you might want to put the platform-specific code into a separate class. For example, you could create an interface

interface IOSSpecific {
    void AddToJumpList(...);
    ...
}

and two implementations of this class, one for >= Win 7 and one for others (which does different things or nothing at all). When your application starts, you instantiate some global variable of type IOSSpecific with either one of the two implementations.