With ArcGIS 10.0 and now ArcGIS 10.1, I'm wondering what is the best way to determine the version of ArcGIS for Desktop that is installed? Is there one location that I can go to in the registry to determine whether 10.0 or 10.1 is installed? Before with ArcGIS 8.x and ArcGIS 9.x, you could just check the registry to determine this information. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ESRI\ArcInfo\Desktop\8.0\RealVersion would provide the version number for all versions of ArcGIS from versions 8.0 through 9.3.1. But with the release of ArcGIS 10.0, there doesn't seem to be one location anymore since you now need to either check HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ESRI\Desktop10.0\RealVersion or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ESRI\Desktop10.1\RealVersion to determine the version number. Which is a problem if you are trying to determine whether 10.0 or 10.1 is installed.
Just thought I'd let everyone know what I ended up doing. I used HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ESRI\ArcGIS\RealVersion to determine the version. From this, you can parse out the version - 10.0 or 10.1. And then you can use this to access the appropriate registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ESRI\Desktop10.x.
Just thought I'd let everyone know what I ended up doing. I used HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ESRI\ArcGIS\RealVersion to determine the version. From this, you can parse out the version - 10.0 or 10.1. And then you can use this to access the appropriate registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ESRI\Desktop10.x.
