How do I Verify that ArcInfo Workstation is Installed?

Question

What is the best way to verify that a machine has ArcInfo Workstation installed? A code sample in VBA, VB or C# would be great!

Answer 1

They say it's acceptable to answer your own question, so here goes ...

Workstation should install a key in Window's registry. So just search the registry to see if it exists.

Here's an example in VB.Net:

Dim key As Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey 
key= Microsoft.Win32.Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey("SOFTWARE\\ESRI\\ArcInfo\\Workstation\\8.0") 
if key is Nothing then 
  'Workstation is not installed.
end if 

Answer 2

If you don't have access to poke around in the registry (happens to me often) a poor-mans method would be to look for the system environment variable ARCHOME. If that's there, check under that for the existence of the executable file ARCHOME\bin\arc.exe (or, on Unix, $ARCHOME\bin\arc.exe).

Because the default "Program Files" folder contains spaces, you are more likely to find ARCHOME at somewhere like : "C:\arcgis\arcexe10x".

ARCHOME is required to be set for ArcInfo Workstation to operate correctly, and it will be removed from the environment on uninstall.

Answer 3

Here's a VBS fragment I used for uninstalling Google Earth via a startup script. You can use these WMI objects to poll machines for the ArcInfo Workstation installation, assuming it's registered in the product catalogue.

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
 & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colSoftware = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
 ("SELECT * FROM Win32_Product WHERE Name = 'Google Earth'")
For Each objSoftware in colSoftware
 objSoftware.Uninstall()
Next

Reference:

Documentation for the Win32_Product class.
WMI Made Easy for C#