Determining which monitors/displays/screens are attached

Question

In the windows desktop properties all the displays are shown and are indicated to be active or inactive. My graphics card has a monitor connected to the dvi port but not the vga and this is correctly determined (i.e. one of the displays is labelled inactive). I also have a usb displaylink lcd which is also detected.

Using system.windows.forms.screen.allscreens I am able to enumerate all the possible displays (in this case, 3) on my system but I am unable to determine which ones are active (i.e. actually have a device connected to them). Is this possible in .net?

None of the properties of system.windows.forms.screen seem to have this information.

EDIT: Noted that my question is actually a duplicate of this question but I only found it after Hans Passant directed me to looking at WMI.

Answer 1

No, it cannot see disabled screens. You'd have to use a low-level hardware query, the kind that are supported by WMI and the System.Management class. I'd guess at Win32_VideoController, Availability member. Use the WMI Code Creator tool to experiment with the query and get the code you want to use in your program.