Detecting USB drive insertion and removal using windows service and c#

Question

Looking into possibility of making an USB distributed application
that will autostart on insertion of an USB stick and shutdown when removing the stick

Will use .Net and C#.
Looking for suggestion how to approach this using C#?

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Update: Two possible solutions implementing this as a service.
- override WndProc
or
- using WMI query with ManagementEventWatcher

Answer 1

There's an article on codeproject.

Answer 2

Try WM_CHANGEDEVICE handling.

Answer 3

You can also use WMI to detect insertion events. It's a little bit more complicated than monitoring for WM_CHANGEDEVICE messages, but it does not require a window handle which may be useful if you are running in the background as a service.

Answer 4

You can use WMI, it is easy and it works a lot better than WndProc solution with services.

Here is a simple example:

ManagementEventWatcher watcher = new ManagementEventWatcher();
WqlEventQuery query = new WqlEventQuery("SELECT * FROM Win32_VolumeChangeEvent WHERE EventType = 2");
watcher.EventArrived += new EventArrivedEventHandler(watcher_EventArrived);
watcher.Query = query;
watcher.Start();
watcher.WaitForNextEvent();

And that's it :)