Detect Windows version in .NET

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System.Environment.OSVersion has the information you need for distinguishing most Windows OS major releases, but not all. It consists of three components which map to the following Windows versions:

+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                    |   PlatformID    |   Major version   |   Minor version   |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Windows 95         |  Win32Windows   |         4         |          0        |
| Windows 98         |  Win32Windows   |         4         |         10        |
| Windows Me         |  Win32Windows   |         4         |         90        |
| Windows NT 4.0     |  Win32NT        |         4         |          0        |
| Windows 2000       |  Win32NT        |         5         |          0        |
| Windows XP         |  Win32NT        |         5         |          1        |
| Windows 2003       |  Win32NT        |         5         |          2        |
| Windows Vista      |  Win32NT        |         6         |          0        |
| Windows 2008       |  Win32NT        |         6         |          0        |
| Windows 7          |  Win32NT        |         6         |          1        |
| Windows 2008 R2    |  Win32NT        |         6         |          1        |
| Windows 8          |  Win32NT        |         6         |          2        |
| Windows 8.1        |  Win32NT        |         6         |          3        |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Windows 10         |  Win32NT        |        10         |          0        |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

For a library that allows you to get a more complete view of the exact release of Windows that the current execution environment is running in, check out this library.

Important note: if your executable assembly manifest doesn’t explicitly state that your exe assembly is compatible with Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.0, System.Environment.OSVersion will return Windows 8 version, which is 6.2, instead of 6.3 and 10.0! Source: here.

Update: In .NET 5.0 and later, System.Environment.OSVersion always returns the actual OS version. For more information, see Environment.OSVersion returns the correct operating system version.

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