What is proper way to detect all available serial ports on Windows?

Question

There are several ways to list serial ports under Windows but I'm not sure what is the proper way: the way that does detect all serial ports that are available.

One good code example is http://www.naughter.com/enumser.html - where there are 9 (nine!) ways of enumerating serial devices.

The question is: what is the optimal way of doing it.

Requirements:

• to not open ports in order to check if they are available.
• to be able to detect ports with different names than COMx.
• to work on Windows XP SP2 or above

Answer 1

void SelectComPort() //added function to find the present serial 
{

    TCHAR lpTargetPath[5000]; // buffer to store the path of the COMPORTS
    DWORD test;
    bool gotPort=0; // in case the port is not found

    for(int i=0; i<255; i++) // checking ports from COM0 to COM255
    {
        CString str;
        str.Format(_T("%d"),i);
        CString ComName=CString("COM") + CString(str); // converting to COM0, COM1, COM2

        test = QueryDosDevice(ComName, (LPSTR)lpTargetPath, 5000);

            // Test the return value and error if any
        if(test!=0) //QueryDosDevice returns zero if it didn't find an object
        {
            m_MyPort.AddString((CString)ComName); // add to the ComboBox
            gotPort=1; // found port
        }

        if(::GetLastError()==ERROR_INSUFFICIENT_BUFFER)
        {
            lpTargetPath[10000]; // in case the buffer got filled, increase size of the buffer.
            continue;
        }

    }

    if(!gotPort) // if not port
    m_MyPort.AddString((CString)"No Active Ports Found"); // to display error message incase no ports found

}