How to programmatically determine the installed version of IE from a script

You can use WMI, I know it's not a rake script, but you could run the script (or create a .NET application) and feed the results into your application.

It's kind of a hack, but at least it will work. Here's some code from technet.

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & _
    "\root\cimv2\Applications\MicrosoftIE")

Set colIESettings = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
    ("Select * from MicrosoftIE_Summary")

For Each strIESetting in colIESettings
    Wscript.Echo strIESetting.Version
Next

Full Source

Once you have this information, you can pass the information to your rake script using the command line.

rake YourScript[<argument from vbscript>]

EDIT: You can copy/paste this code into a file, name it whatever.vbs, and use the cscript command to execute the script.

cscript //Nologo ie_version.vbs