How to get os name, version in windows?

Which one is bet开发者_运维问答ter in following aspects to get OS name, OS version in windows -

1. time in getting information
2. compatibility in all windows OS like xp, vista and higher

systeminfo or wmic command? I wanted to avoid the use of OSVersionInfoEx in C as one has to hardcode the marketing name detection and will add to maintenance work if new flavour of windows gets introduced. Please share your opinion.

GetVersionEx - You can't get any faster than this for getting a basic os version number. But you are right, you won't be able to map newer versions of the OS to the correct string. Have you considered just doing this:

OSVERSIONINFOEX version = {};
char szOS[MAX_OS_LENGTH];

version.dwOSVersionInfoSize = sizeof(version);
GetVersionEx((OSVERSIONINFO*)&version);

if (MyFunctionToMapVersionToString(&version, szOS) == false)
{
    sprintf(szOS, "Microsoft Windows %d.%d", version.dwMajorVersion, version.dwMinorVersion);
}

WMI - A bit more code to write. But you could likely just do this at app startup (or when it's needed) and cache the result if the information is needed again. It's not like the operating system product name will change after the app has queried for it once. :) As to backwards compatibility, I'm sure it work fine on older operating systems... but you are going to test it before shipping it to the customer, right?

If you want an undocumented way, there is a registry key that has exactly what you want in it:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion ("ProductName")