A Mutable Log

A blog by Devendra Tewari

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USB device information using WMI

The System.Management namespace of the .NET framework has some Windows-specific features for recovering information regarding a USB device. The following list of Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) classes are enough to recover almost all information one could need regarding the device.

• Win32_PnPEntity

  Information regarding vendor and product IDs, device name etc

• Win32_SystemDriver

  Information regarding the driver itself such as driver file name and path

• Win32_PnPSignedDriver

  Information regarding the driver inf file and more

The FriendlyName attribute is common to all of these classes and can be used to filter for a specific device.

This is how one can query for a specific USB device if you have a product and vendor ID for it

  ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher(
    "SELECT PNPDeviceID, Name, Service FROM Win32_PnPEntity WHERE PNPDeviceID LIKE "
    + "'%VID[_]xxxx&PID[_]xxxx%'");

  foreach (ManagementObject entity in searcher.Get())
  {
    // do something useful
  }

The Service field can be used to determine which system driver is being used, or filter results based on it.

These are some values the field can assume

• BthPan

  Bluetooth PAN (personal area network) profile device.

• usb_rndisx

  USB RNDIS device.

Kudos to Emerson de Lira Espinola for helping out with this.