Detecting Flash Player in Registry

[Guest]

Hi!

I'm making an installer(.msi) for my program with the help of visual studio 2005 tools (in Win 7 64 bit system and Win xp - 32 bit). What is the best way to detect if flash player is installed or not ? I tried doing that with the help of the registry key but it didn't work. Maybe I was not detecting the right key. Can someone give some general guidelines on detecting flash player ?

[Guest · Accepted solution]

Hi Varunvp,

You can detect if Flash Player is installed by using the following registry keys:

32-bit Flash Player on 32-bit Windows: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Macromedia

32-bit Flash Player on 64-bit Windows: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Macromedia

64-bit Flash Player on 64-bit Windows: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Macromedia

Note the following:

1. It is usually sufficient to detect the 32-bit Flash Player, since the installer for 64-bit is installing both 32-bit and 64-bit Flash Players.

2. There are subkeys for both ActiveX (Internet Explorer) and Plugin (Mozilla-based browsers) Flash Players at the locations given above. You can detect a specific type of Flash Player by using these keys, if necessary.

For instructions on how to access the registry, please refer to http://msdn.microsoft.com/

Thanks,

Stephen

[Guest]

Thanks for that Stephen. That helped.