Best Way To Determine If .NET 3.5 Is Installed

Question

I need to programatically determine whether .NET 3.5 is installed. I thought it would be easy:

<% Response.Write(Environment.Version.ToString()); %>
         


        

Answer 1

Without any assembly loading and catching exceptions (which is slow), check for class API changes between 2.0 and 3.5. Mono Class Status is very helpful for this. For example you could check for GC.Collect Method (Int32, GCCollectionMode) which is in mscorlib and was added in 3.5 .