Differentiating 64-bit Editions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003

Microsoft Windows provides a lot of base services on which applications can be written, but there are differences between all the various editions of Windows. While it’s far more common to have a minimum dependency on a particular platform, cases may arise where an application may require, for example, Windows XP but won’t run on Windows Server 2003. The recent release of Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 2 Preview is one such example, requiring Windows XP SP2.

While ultimately you should use the AppSearch table and related tables like the DrLocator table for finding directories and files, along with the Signature table for detecting versions of files, validating a particular platform may be good enough in support scenarios.

If you have an application that will only run in Windows XP and Windows XP 64-bit but won’t run in Windows Server 2003 SP1 64-bit you’ll find that the VersionNT property for both of the latter 64-bit platforms is the same value: 502. The same is true for the VersionNT64 property that is set only on 64-bit platforms. What’s more is that the WindowsBuild property and ServicePackLevel property for both 64-bit editions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is the same: 3790 and 1, respectively. Now what?

Fortunately there’s the MsiNTProductType property defined for NT platforms with Windows Installer 2.0 and later. For Windows XP which is a workstation platform, this value will be 1. For Windows Server 2003 this value will be 2 for a domain controller, and 3 for a server edition. Since, from the Windows Installer Supportability matrix, Windows XP RTM ships with Windows Installer 2.0 rest assured that this property will be defined for this scenario. So if you only wanted your application to install on Windows XP editions you could add the following condition to your LaunchCondition table:

VersionNT = 501 OR (VersionNT64 = 502 AND MsiNTProductType = 1)

These values corresponds to the values for the OSVERSIONEX.wProductType field obtained from the native GetVersionEx function. There are more operating system properties that correspond to other fields in the OSVERSIONEX structure you can use in Windows Installer as well.