How can I detect if my app is running on Windows 10

I’m looking for a means to detect if my C# app is running on Windows 10.

I had hoped that Environment.OSVersion would do the trick, but this seems to return a Version of 6.3.9600.0 on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.

Other solutions such as this don’t seem to distinguish between Windows 8 and Windows 10 either.

Why do I need to do this?

Because I’m using a WinForms WebBrowser control to host an OAuth page that crashes and burns in older IE versions (my app connects to a user’s Nest account. ).

By default, the WebBrowser control emulates IE7. Using a Registry key, you can tell it to emulate the latest version of IE that is installed on the host PC. However, the value that worked up to Windows 8.1 (and pre-releases of Windows 10) does not work in the final version of Windows 10.

7 Answers 7

If you look at registry you will found environment name:

For example my product name is Windows 10 Home :

With this code you get if it Windows 10:

Note: Add using Microsoft.Win32; to your usings.

Answer

Use Environment.OSVersion and add an application manifest file with relevant supportedOS elements uncommented.

e.g. add this under

Reason

I don’t like the answer from @Mitat Koyuncu because is uses the registry unnecessarily and as mentioned in the comments uses unreliable string parsing.

I also don’t like the answer from @sstan because it uses third party code and it needs the application manifest anyway.

Windows 10: VerifyVersionInfo returns false when called by applications that do not have a compatibility manifest for Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 if the lpVersionInfo parameter is set so that it specifies Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, even when the current operating system version is Windows 8.1 or Windows 10. Specifically, VerifyVersionInfo has the following behavior:

• If the application has no manifest, VerifyVersionInfo behaves as if the operation system version is Windows 8 (6.2).

• If the application has a manifest that contains the GUID that corresponds to Windows 8.1, VerifyVersionInfo behaves as if the operation system version is Windows 8.1 (6.3).

• If the application has a manifest that contains the GUID that corresponds to Windows 10, VerifyVersionInfo behaves as if the operation system version is Windows 10 (10.0).

The reason is because VerifyVersionInfo is deprecated in Windows 10.

How to test whether a service is running from the command line

I would like to be able to query whether or not a service is running from a windows batch file. I know I can use:

but, this dumps out some text. What I really want is for it to set the errorlevel environment variable so that I can take action on that.

Do you know a simple way I can do this?

UPDATE
Thanks for the answers so far. I’m worried the solutions that parse the text may not work on non English operating systems. Does anybody know a way around this, or am I going to have to bite the bullet and write a console program to get this right.

14 Answers 14

Let’s go back to the old school of batch programing on windows

This will work everywhere.

if you don’t mind to combine the net command with grep you can use the following script.

You could use wmic with the /locale option

Thinking a little bit outside the box here I’m going to propose that powershell may be an answer on up-to-date XP/2003 machines and certainly on Vista/2008 and newer (instead of .bat/.cmd). Anyone who has some Perl in their background should feel at-home pretty quickly.

Another way, if you have significant investment in batch is to run the PS script as a one-liner, returning an exit code.

How to check if a service is running via batch file and start it, if it is not running?

I want to write a batch file that performs the following operations:

• Check if a service is running
  • If is it running, quit the batch
  • If it is not running, start the service

The code samples I googled so far turned out not to be working, so I decided not to post them.

Starting a service is done by:

1. How can I check if a service is running, and how to make an if statement in a batchfile?
2. I’m a bit confused. What is the argument I have to pass onto the net start? The service name or its display name?

14 Answers 14

To check a service’s state, use sc query . For if blocks in batch files, check the documentation.

The following code will check the status of the service MyServiceName and start it if it is not running (the if block will be executed if the service is not running):

Explanation of what it does:

1. Queries the properties of the service.
2. Looks for the line containing the text «STATE»
3. Tokenizes that line, and pulls out the 3rd token, which is the one containing the state of the service.
4. Tests the resulting state against the string «RUNNING»

As for your second question, the argument you will want to pass to net start is the service name, not the display name.

Checking if my Windows application is running

How do I check if my C# Windows application is running ?

I know that I can check the process name but the name can be changed if the exe changes.

Is there any way to have a hash key or something to make my application unique?

9 Answers 9

The recommended way is to use a Mutex. You can check out a sample here : http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/singleinstance.aspx

In specific the code:

For my WPF application i’ve defined global app id and use semaphore to handle it.

you need a way to say that «i am running» from the app,

1) open a WCF ping service 2) write to registry/file on startup and delete on shutdown 3) create a Mutex

. i prefer the WCF part because you may not clean up file/registry correctly and Mutex seems to have its own issues

Mutex and Semaphore didn’t work in my case (I tried them as suggested, but it didn’t do the trick in the application I developed). The answer abramlimpin provided worked for me, after I made a slight modification.

This is how I got it working finally. First, I created some helper functions:

Then, I added the following to the main method:

If you invoke the application a 3rd, 4th . time, it does not show the warning any more and just exits immediately.

How to check if a process is running via a batch script

How can I check if an application is running from a batch (well cmd) file?

I need to not launch another instance if a program is already running. (I can’t change the app to make it single instance only.)

Also the application could be running as any user.

18 Answers 18

Another possibility I came up with, inspired by using grep, is:

It doesn’t need to save an extra file, so I prefer this method.

Here’s how I’ve worked it out:

The above will open Notepad if it is not already running.

Edit: Note that this won’t find applications hidden from the tasklist. This will include any scheduled tasks running as a different user, as these are automatically hidden.

I like Chaosmaster’s solution! But I looked for a solution which does not start another external program (like find.exe or findstr.exe). So I added the idea from Matt Lacey’s solution, which creates an also avoidable temp file. At the end I could find a fairly simple solution, so I share it.

This is working for me nicely.

The suggestion of npocmaka to use QPROCESS instead of TASKLIST is great but, its answer is so big and complex that I feel obligated to post a quite simplified version of it which, I guess, will solve the problem of most non-advanced users:

The code above was tested in Windows 7, with a user with administrator rigths.

Under Windows you can use Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to ensure that no apps with the specified command line is launched, for example:

wmic process where (name=»nmake.exe») get commandline | findstr /i /c:»/f load.mak» /c:»/f build.mak» > NUL && (echo THE BUILD HAS BEEN STARTED ALREADY! > %ALREADY_STARTED% & exit /b 1)

I use PV.exe from http://www.teamcti.com/pview/prcview.htm installed in Program Files\PV with a batch file like this:

TrueY’s answer seemed the most elegant solution, however, I had to do some messing around because I didn’t understand what exactly was going on. Let me clear things up to hopefully save some time for the next person.

TrueY’s modified Answer:

Anyway, I hope that helps. I know sometimes reading batch/command-line can be kind of confusing sometimes if you’re kind of a newbie, like me.

The answer provided by Matt Lacey works for Windows XP. However, in Windows Server 2003 the line

INFO: No tasks are running which match the specified criteria.

which is then read as the process is running.

I don’t have a heap of batch scripting experience, so my soulution is to then search for the process name in the search.log file and pump the results into another file and search that for any output.

I hope this helps someone else.

I like the WMIC and TASKLIST tools but they are not available in home/basic editions of windows.Another way is to use QPROCESS command available on almost every windows machine (for the ones that have terminal services — I think only win XP without SP2 , so practialy every windows machine):

QPROCESS command is not so powerful as TASKLIST and is limited in showing only 12 symbols of process name but should be taken into consideration if TASKLIST is not available.

More simple usage where it uses the name if the process as an argument (the .exe suffix is mandatory in this case where you pass the executable name):

The difference between two ways of QPROCESS usage is that the QPROCESS * will list all processes while QPROCESS some.exe will filter only the processes for the current user.

Using WMI objects through windows script host exe instead of WMIC is also an option.It should on run also on every windows machine (excluding the ones where the WSH is turned off but this is a rare case).Here bat file that lists all processes through WMI classes and can be used instead of QPROCESS in the script above (it is a jscript/bat hybrid and should be saved as .bat ):

And a modification that will check if a process is running:

The two options could be used on machines that have no TASKLIST .

The ultimate technique is using MSHTA . This will run on every windows machine from XP and above and does not depend on windows script host settings. the call of MSHTA could reduce a little bit the performance though (again should be saved as bat):