Visual Basic 2008 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

15.2. Retrieve the Value of an Environment Variable

Problem

You need to retrieve the value of an environment variable for use in your application.

Solution

Use the GetEnvironmentVariable, GetEnvironmentVariables, and ExpandEnvironmentVariables methods of the Environment class.

How It Works

The GetEnvironmentVariable method allows you to retrieve a string containing the value of a single named environment variable, whereas the GetEnvironmentVariables method returns an object implementing IDictionary that contains the names and values of all environment variables as strings. .NET Framework 2.0 introduced additional overloads of the GetEnvironmentVariable and GetEnvironmentVariables methods, which take a System.EnvironmentVariableTarget argument, ...