In March I showed how to get the version of a connected device from the desktop. This post documents the rest of the registry settings used to store device information. There are two registry locations, the first at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows CE Services contains information about the currently connected device. The second, HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows CE Services\Partners contains information for each of the partnerships established on the desktop PC.
When the device is docked, regardless of whether a partnership is established, the following keys are populated in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows CE Services:-
- DeviceHardwareId -String containing a unique Guid for the device
- DeviceOemInfo - OEM specific string (as returned by SystemParametersInfo using SPI_GETOEMINFO) e.g. WIZA200 (HTC Wizard)
- DeviceProcessorType - DWORD value - 2577 (ARM) for all Windows Mobile devices
- DeviceType - string containing platform type (as returned by SystemParamtersInfo using SPI_GETPLATFORMTYPE) e.g. PocketPC or SmartPhone
- DeviceVersion - DWORD value - see my previous post.
The partnerships are stored with a unique DWORD partnership id e.g.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows CE Services\Partners\12345678\
There are additional values to describe sync behaviour and some Windows Mobile Device Center specific values e.g. to specify the display icon for a device. Otherwise all of the above values are duplicated here for the partner device, except with some naming differences:-
- DeviceHardwareId
- OemInfo
- ProcessorType
- DeviceType
- Version
Each partnership has a directory containing any resources used, this includes the icon etc. The path is retrieved from the DataFolder value. This is a path beneath the users roaming application data folder which you would get using System.Environment.GetFolder(System.Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData)
The icon is specified in DeviceIconFile and if you append this to the path you'll have the full filename of the icon.