Detecting (unknown) hardware in .NET

Question

I need some pointers on how to detect unknown hardware using .NET and C++/C#. I'm looking for the technique to use under NET to do this.

What I basically want is to identify the PCIID/USBID and so on for all the hardware in the machine. Of course I also need this for the hardware that doesn't yet has a driver installed.

I believe this will be in the Windows DDK somewhere, but where do I get started? Any pointers will be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

I think you'll be in for a lot of P/Invoke-ing, but I would indeed start with the WDK (formerly known as the DDK).

I'd start with taking a look at devcon.exe. Binary is at tools\devcon; sources are at src\setup\devcon.