Finding serial port names of usb to serial converters on window machines

As usual, this is a #noteformyself article on how to find serial port names of USB to serial converters on Windows® machines.

On Windows® operating systems, the main source of information of currently opened COM ports, and of COM port to which a certain USB converter has been attached to, is the Registry, and, more precisely, the following KEYS/KEY GROUP under the HKLM (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE) group:

• SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB;
• HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM;

Typical use is when software has to read some data from a USB device emulating a COM port (e.g. an Arduino® sending temperature and humidity read from a DHT11 sensor). Changing the USB port

will typically result in a COM port number change. 

There are many ways to avoid the necessity to change it in a configuration file, or even worst, recompiling the software, and many articles, blog posts suggesting good solutions for different programming languages.

I'll begin with three of the programming languages I daily use, C++ and C#, then a project for  TypeScript/JavaScript will follow.

C++ Demo

SerialPortFinder is the C++ project

C# Demo

USBInfo is a .NET/C# project.

All the code can be found on my Github repo at the following link.

Enjoy