Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook

Get Application Information

The My.Application object provides a wealth of information right at your fingertips. Getting this information is as easy as retrieving a property.

Note

Using the My.Application object, you can get information about the current version of your application, where it's located, and what parameters were used to start it.

How do I do that?

The information in the My.Application object comes in handy in a variety of situations. Here are two examples:

• You want to get the exact version number. This could be useful if you want to build a dynamic About box, or check with a web service to make sure you have the latest version of an assembly.

• You want to record some diagnostic details. This becomes important if a problem is occurring at a client site and you need to log some general information about the application that's running.

To create a straightforward example, you can use the code in Example 2-1 in a console application. It retrieves all of these details and displays a complete report in a console window.

Example 2-1. Retrieving information from My.Application

' Find out what parameters were used to start the application. Console.Write("Command line parameters: ") For Each Arg As String In My.Application.CommandLineArgs Console.Write(Arg & " ") Next Console.WriteLine( ) Console.WriteLine( ) ' Find out some information about the assembly where this code is located. ' This information comes from metadata (attributes in your code). Console.WriteLine("Company: " & My.Application.Info.CompanyName) ...