Is there an Adobe equivalent to the Java deployment.properties file?

Question

Just as the title states, is there an Adobe equivalent to the Java deployment.properties file?

I am writing ac# application to test installations of application in our network. The top three on my boss's list are java, flash, and reader. I need to be able to find out what versions of each application are installed on a machine for the reports im going to generate (force the user to update/etc).

I know i can check version number and confirm the ability of IE to access my JRE by checking "\\Sun\\Java\\Deployment\\deployment.properties". What file would I check to confirm the same for adobe reader and flash?

Thanks in advance for any help given or links provided to more info.

edit: I need to do this from the browser.

Answer 1

This is not a very clean solution, but since the only "official" way seems to be to check it from the Windows registries perhaps this will help:

We know that the flash files are located are in the (windows directory)\\system32\\Macromed\\Flash (or SysWow64\\Macromed\\Flash on 64 bit systems).

Each time a flash updates it keeps the track of the progress in the log files. Depending on the flash version you will either have a) install.log (very old versions of flash) or b) FlashInstall.log

a) If you browse through the file you see various entires and one type goes like this: WriteRegStr: "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\SOFTWARE\\Macromedia\\FlashPlayer" "FlashPlayerVersion"="10.0.45.2" .

Now you can just go through that file bottom-top and match the "FlashPlayerVersion"= string to get the most recent version.

However, this is for a really old versions of flash and the install.log file never got deleted from this directory, so make sure you check for the FlashInstall.log too!

b) Use a similar approach, except the new install logs don't keep the "WriteRegStr" information. Now you can instead look for the dll file name itself, for example my last update created an install log 0009 [I] 00000014 C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\Macromed\\Flash\\NPSWF32_11_5_502_146.dll , meaning my flash version is 11.5.502.146

another options are to

• check the plugin core files creation date and compare with the versions release dates (quite unreliable in case someone somehow manages to install an older version)
• check the actual property of the NPSWF[..version..].dll file. You can see all the complete and precise version details in the "Version" tab. however, I don't know how to access the rightclick->properties from inside a script, so you'll have to find out by yourself if you decide to go for this option
• ask the unicorns