Diff between Instance id and Hardware id?

Question

What is the difference between Instance Id and Hardware id? Is this unique for any usb device?

I connected one usb device (which is used as license for my application). When I connected to differenct ports it is generating different instance ids (I see in device manager details).

I want to get device instance id and hardware id whenever user connects usb to a port, using vc++6.0.

Answer 1

The instance ID specifies one specific device. If you would have two identical USB devices connected to your PC, they would have different instance IDs (and different USB port numbers of course). Naturally, since they're identical, they'd have identical Hardware IDs - hardware IDs are associated with a device type