How to detect Windows 64-bit platform with .NET?

Question

In a .NET 2.0 C# application I use the following code to detect the operating system platform:

string os_platform = System.Environment.OSVersion.Platform.ToString();

This returns "Win32NT". The problem is that it returns "Win32NT" even when running on Windows Vista 64-bit.

Is there any other method to know the correct platform (32 or 64 bit)?

Note that it should also detect 64 bit when run as a 32 bit application on Windows 64 bit.

Answer 1

UPDATE: As Joel Coehoorn and others suggest, starting at .NET Framework 4.0, you can just check Environment.Is64BitOperatingSystem.

---

IntPtr.Size won't return the correct value if running in 32-bit .NET Framework 2.0 on 64-bit Windows (it would return 32-bit).

As Microsoft's Raymond Chen describes, you have to first check if running in a 64-bit process (I think in .NET you can do so by checking IntPtr.Size), and if you are running in a 32-bit process, you still have to call the Win API function IsWow64Process. If this returns true, you are running in a 32-bit process on 64-bit Windows.

Microsoft's Raymond Chen: How to detect programmatically whether you are running on 64-bit Windows

My solution:

static bool is64BitProcess = (IntPtr.Size == 8);
static bool is64BitOperatingSystem = is64BitProcess || InternalCheckIsWow64();

[DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true, CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Winapi)]
[return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)]
private static extern bool IsWow64Process(
    [In] IntPtr hProcess,
    [Out] out bool wow64Process
);

public static bool InternalCheckIsWow64()
{
    if ((Environment.OSVersion.Version.Major == 5 && Environment.OSVersion.Version.Minor >= 1) ||
        Environment.OSVersion.Version.Major >= 6)
    {
        using (Process p = Process.GetCurrentProcess())
        {
            bool retVal;
            if (!IsWow64Process(p.Handle, out retVal))
            {
                return false;
            }
            return retVal;
        }
    }
    else
    {
        return false;
    }
}