An Interesting Aside: Some Additional Members of the System.Environment Class

The Environment class exposes a number of extremely helpful methods beyond GetCommandLineArgs(). Specifically, this class allows you to obtain a number of details regarding the operating system currently hosting your .NET application using various static members. To illustrate the usefulness of System.Environment, update your Main() method to call a helper method named ShowEnvironmentDetails().

static int Main(string[] args)
{
    ...
    // Helper method within the Program class.
    ShowEnvironmentDetails();
    
    Console.ReadLine();
    return -1;
}

Implement this method within your Program class to call various members of the Environment type.

static void ShowEnvironmentDetails()
{
    // Print out the drives on this machine,
    // and other interesting details.
    foreach (string drive in Environment.GetLogicalDrives())
        Console.WriteLine("Drive: {0}", drive);

    Console.WriteLine("OS: {0}", Environment.OSVersion);
    Console.WriteLine("Number of processors: {0}",
        Environment.ProcessorCount);
    Console.WriteLine(".NET Version: {0}",
        Environment.Version);
}

Figure 3-4 shows a possible test run of invoking this method. If you did not specify command-line arguments via the Visual Studio 2010 Debug tab, you will not find them printed to the console.

Figure 3-4. Displaying system environment variables

The Environment type defines members other than those shown in the previous example. Table 3-1 documents some additional properties of interest; however, be sure to check out the .NET Framework 4.0 SDK documentation for full details.

Table 3-1. Select Properties of System.Environment

Source Code The SimpleCSharpApp project is located under the Chapter 3 subdirectory.