Am I Running on Windows Mobile 6

Following Daniel’s post announcing the appearance of the Windows Mobile 6 SDKs on Microsoft’s download site, I headed off to get the SDKs and start poking around. A common question I can see arising is how to detect if you are running on WM6 from your managed code. The answer is to use the System.Environment.OSVersion.Version property. If your device is running WM6 this will report back 5.2 (for the emulators the full build is 5.2.318 but the build numbers are likely to change by the time real devices emerge). In contrast WM5.0 devices report back 5.1 (5.1.1700 for the original 5.0 SDK emulators). Both platforms are running on top of Windows CE 5.0, and not Windows Embedded CE 6.0 which is currently available, and understandably this can cause some confusion when the OS and marketing versions don’t exactly tie up. The .1 and .2 minor versions are special Windows CE releases for Windows Mobile which are not available to generic CE platform builders. You may remember a similar thing occuring with Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition which had an OS version of 4.21.