Auto Detect Windows Mobile Device programmatically

Question

Hi

I am writing a windows application (written entirely in C++) which reads files from a storage card on a mobile phone running Windows Mobile. The tough part is, I don't know how to make my application detect the event that a user has connected the mobile phone to the USB of laptop. I did some reading on MSDN and have written a small code using RegisterDeviceNotification, which detects whenever a USB disk is attached/removed from the laptop. However, I am unable to tweak this to make it work for phone type devices. Please help me out through any links/tutroials which explains this(preferrably C++, as I don't know .NET or C#).

Thanks Alok

Answer 1

According to this article you can use RegisterDeviceNotification to get notifications when activesync detects a device has been plugged/unplugged. (See option 3 at the end of the article)

It may just be a matter of setting up the correct notification filter.

Answer 2

Windows Mobile devices use RNDIS, a network interface protocol behind the scenes. Hence, the RegisterDeviceNotification method still works, but you're looking for a DEV_BROADCAST_DEVICEINTERFACE, not DEV_BROADCAST_VOLUME. (i.e. dbch_devicetype==DBT_DEVTYP_DEVICEINTERFACE)

Answer 3

You can use RAPI or RAPI2 to detect when a Windows Mobile device connects to a PC via Active Sync or Windows Mobile Device Center. RAPI can also be used to read the files on the storage card and much more.

RAPI is simpler to program because it is a C based API. RAPI2 has more functionality than RAPI, but is an object oriented COM API. If your needs are simple and you only care about one device/connection at a time then RAPI is good enough. There are two RAPI functions used to detect connections: CeRapiInit (blocking), and CeRapiInitEx (signals an event upon connection).