Notepad Path in VS2008

Question

In my application, I have defined the following:

public static readonly string NOTEPAD = "%windir%\\notepad.exe";

I can type in the text value of NOTEPAD into the Run command on my Win7 machine, and Notepad will open.

However, from within my Visual Studio C# project, the Write Line routine will fire every time:

  if (!File.Exists(NOTEPAD)) {
    Console.WriteLine("File Not Found: " + NOTEPAD);
  }

Does Visual Studio not understand %windir%?

Answer 1

Instead of expanding the variable manually as suggested by the other answers so far, you can have the Environment class do this for you just like the Run command does:

if (!File.Exists(Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariables(NOTEPAD))) {
  Console.WriteLine("File Not Found: " + NOTEPAD);
}

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.environment.expandenvironmentvariables.aspx