Dealing with DllImport, (Part 2 of 2)  : Page 2

To declare the GetVersionEx function, you can pretty much follow the same DllImport pattern as you saw in first part of this article. One new twist is that the code applies both In and Out direction attributes to the OSVersionInfo parameter, so that the managed caller can see the changes the unmanaged code makes to the structure. A ref attribute would also have worked.

      [ DllImport( "kernel32" )]
      public static extern bool GetVersionEx( 
         [In, Out] OSVersionInfo osvi );
 

You can now instantiate the OSVersionInfo class just like any other class. The Marshal.SizeOf() method determines the size of the unmanaged structure, in bytes, which is what the API function need to know.

         [STAThread]
         static void Main(string[] args)
         {
            OSVersionInfo osvi = new OSVersionInfo();
            osvi.dwOSVersionInfoSize = 
            Marshal.SizeOf( osvi );
   
            GetVersionEx( osvi );
 

Printing out the results of the call is now a trivial exercise:

   
            Console.WriteLine( "GetVersionEx results");
            Console.WriteLine( "Class size:    {0}", 
               osvi.dwOSVersionInfoSize );
            Console.WriteLine( "Major Version: {0}", 
               osvi.dwMajorVersion );
            Console.WriteLine( "Minor Version: {0}", 
               osvi.dwMinorVersion );
            Console.WriteLine( "Build Number:  {0}", 
               osvi.dwBuildNumber );
            Console.WriteLine( "Platform Id:   {0}", 
               osvi.dwPlatformId );
            Console.WriteLine( "CSD Version:   {0}", 
               osvi.szCSDVersion );
 

For most purposes, you won't need to go through all of that to find out what OS platform and version is running: the Environment.OSVersion class contains the Platform Id and the version/build string, although not the CSD version string (which indicates the service pack level).

   
            Console.WriteLine( 
               "\nEnvironment.OSVersion results");
            Console.WriteLine( "Platform:      {0}", 
               Environment.OSVersion.Platform );
            Console.WriteLine( "Version:       {0}", 
               Environment.OSVersion.Version );
         }
      }
   }
 

On my Windows 2000 machine, this code produces the following output:

   GetVersionEx results
   Class size:    148
   Major Version: 5
   Minor Version: 0
   Build Number:  2195
   Platform Id:   2
   CSD Version:   Service Pack 2
   
   Environment.OSVersion results
   Platform:      Win32NT
   Version:       5.0.2195.0
 

For a good idea of how to accomplish the same thing in VB.NET, you should consult the .NET OSInfo sample, which was my starting point for the fleshed-out sample above.

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