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Licensed and distributed under the terms of the MIT license.
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The Managed Version Helpers Library is a free and open source .NET assembly that provides a managed implementation of the native Version Helper functions found in the Microsoft Windows® SDK.
- Microsoft® .NET Framework 4.0, or higher
To build the assembly, you can either use Microsoft® Visual Studio® or a compatible IDE that supports the Visual Studio Solution File format, or the batch files in the root of the repository (BuildDebug.cmd, BuildPublish.cmd, and BuildRelease.cmd).
Both the Debug and Release project configurations are delay-signed by default, using the public key of the official strong-name keyfile, which is part of this repository.
Besides the traditional Debug and Release project configurations, there is a third one called Publish that can be used to build a version of the assembly that is configured for redistribution.
Please note that the Publish project configuration requires a valid strong-name keyfile named VersionHelpers.snk to be present in the snk directory; otherwise, the build process will fail. The official strong-name keyfile is not part of this repository! You have to provide your own public/private keypair for your (inofficial) redistributable assembly.
Every configuration supports v4.0 and v4.5 as target framework version. Support for v2.0 has been dropped with the Windows 10 release.
Example C# code:
using System.Windows;
class Program
{
static void Main(String[] args)
{
if (VersionHelpers.IsWindows7OrGreater()) {
Console.WriteLine("Hello on Windows 7 or greater!");
} else {
Console.WriteLine("You need Windows 7 or greater to be greeted!");
}
}
}
Make sure to add a reference to the VersionHelpers.dll in order to be able to compile the example above.
In addition to the documentation found here, you can also refer to the official MSDN documentation for further information about the original Version Helper functions.
Apart from using the Visual Studio solution that is used for building the assembly, you are free to use the raw C# source file of the VersionHelpers object (located in the file src\VersionHelpers\Sources\VersionHelpers.cs) in your own projects and modify it according to your needs. The entire implementation for the managed version helpers is kept in this single source file.
By default, the static VersionHelpers object resides in the System.Windows namespace because that's the place where it should naturally belong to. You are free to change that according to your needs, of course.
In order to increase performance, the result of all version helper methods is cached in a static read-only field. This significantly reduces the amount of calls into unmanaged code as the specific Windows version has to be determined only once at runtime.
The Managed Version Helpers Library is licensed and distributed under the terms of the MIT license. Please see License.md for the entire license text.
File: Readme.md