Programmatically Enumerating Installations of the FrontPage Server Extensions

I had a great question from a customer the other day: "How do you programmatically enumerate how many web sites on a server have the FrontPage Server Extensions installed?" Of course, that's one of those questions that sounds so simple at first, and then you start to think about how to actually go about it and it gets a little more complicated.

The first thought that came to mind was to just look for all the "W3SVCnnnn" subfolders that are located in the "%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\Web Server Extensions\50" folder. (These folders contain the "ROLES.INI" files for each installation.) The trouble with this solution is that some folders and files do not get cleaned up when the server extensions are uninstalled, so you'd get erroneous results.

The next thought that came to mind was to check the registry, because each installation of the server extensions will create a string value and subkey named "Port /LM/W3SVC/nnnn:" under the "[HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\Ports]" key. Enumerating these keys will give you the list of web sites that have the server extensions or SharePoint installed. The string values that are located under the subkey contain some additional useful information, so I thought that as long as I was enumerating the keys, I might as well enumerate those values.

The resulting script is listed below, and when run it will create a log file that lists all of the web sites that have the server extensions or SharePoint installed on the server that is specified by the "strComputer" constant.

Option Explicit

Const strComputer = "localhost"

Dim objFSO, objFile
Dim objRegistry
Dim strRootKeyPath, strSubKeyPath, strValue
Dim arrRootValueTypes, arrRootValueNames
Dim arrSubValueTypes, arrSubValueNames
Dim intLoopA, intLoopB

Const HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE = &H80000002
Const REG_SZ = 1

strRootKeyPath = "Software\Microsoft\" & _
  "Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\Ports"

Set objFSO = WScript.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile("ServerExtensions.Log")

objFile.WriteLine String(40,"-")
objFile.WriteLine "Report for server: " & UCase(strComputer)
objFile.WriteLine String(40,"-")

Set objRegistry = GetObject(_
  "winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & _
  strComputer & "\root\default:StdRegProv")
objRegistry.EnumValues HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, strRootKeyPath, _
  arrRootValueNames, arrRootValueTypes

For intLoopA = 0 To UBound(arrRootValueTypes)
  If arrRootValueTypes(intLoopA) = REG_SZ Then
    objFile.WriteLine arrRootValueNames(intLoopA)
    strSubKeyPath = strRootKeyPath & _
      "\" & arrRootValueNames(intLoopA)
    objRegistry.EnumValues HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, _
      strSubKeyPath, arrSubValueNames, arrSubValueTypes
    For intLoopB = 0 To UBound(arrSubValueTypes)
      If arrSubValueTypes(intLoopB) = REG_SZ Then
        objRegistry.GetStringValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, _
          strSubKeyPath, arrSubValueNames(intLoopB), strValue
        objFile.WriteLine vbTab & _
          arrSubValueNames(intLoopB) & "=" & strValue
      End If
    Next
    objFile.WriteLine String(40,"-")
  End If
Next

objFile.Close

The script should be fairly easy to understand, and you can customize it to suit your needs. For example, you could change the "strComputer" constant to a string array and loop through an array of servers.

Note: More information about the WMI objects used in the script can be found on the following pages:

Hope this helps!

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