How to get installation path of an application?

Question

In Windows using C#, how can I get the installation path of a software (for example consider NUnit or any other software like MS word, etc.) from my project

Answer 1

Steps to extract value from registry are shown in following code snippet. You may already know that there are no standard rules for applications to place their installation info. The steps shown below are for COM based applications where the appplication must provide Local executable path in a reasonably standard manner.

For non-com applications, check to see if some data can be extracted from installed applications cache.

I hate to admit that the solution is not as elegant as I want it to be. Each subkey has to opened in series and opening in single method does not work.

//string hiveName = @"CLSID"; // for 64 bit COM 7applications
string hiveName = @"WOW6432Node\CLSID"; // for 32 bit COM applications
using (RegistryKey key = Registry.ClassesRoot.OpenSubKey(hiveName))

{
  if (key != null) {
      using (RegistryKey key2 = key.OpenSubKey("{}"))
  {
  if (key2 != null) {
    using (RegistryKey key3 = key2.OpenSubKey("LocalServer32"))
  {
  if (key3 != null) {
    return key3.GetValue("").ToString();
  }
}