Question

Does anybody know a way to deactivate the autoplay function of windows using c#/.NET?

Answer 1

A little summary, for all the others looking for a good way to disable/supress autoplay.
So far I’ve found 3 methods to disable autoplay programatically:

1. Intercepting the QueryCancelAutoPlay message
2. Using the Registry
3. Implementing the COM Interface IQueryCancelAutoPlay

In the end I chose the 3rd method and used the IQueryCancelAutoPlay interface because the others had some signifcant disadvantages:

• The first method
  (QueryCancelAutoPlay) was only able
  to suppress autoplay if the
  application window was in the foreground, cause only the foreground window receives the message
• Configuring autoplay in the registry worked even if the application window was in the background. The downside: It required a restart of the currently running explorer.exe to take effect…so this was no solution to temporarily disable autoplay.

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Examples for the implementation

1. QueryCancelAutoPlay

• Suppressing AutoRun Programmatically (MSDN article)
• CodeProject: Preventing a CD from Auto-Playing
• Canceling AutoPlay from C#

Note: If your application is using a dialog box you need to call SetWindowLong (signature) instead of just returning false. See here for more details)

2. Registry

Using the registry you can disables AutoRun for specified drive letters (NoDriveAutoRun) or for a class of drives (NoDriveTypeAutoRun)

• Using the Registry to Disable AutoRun (MSDN article)
• How to Enable / Disable Autorun for a Drive (using Registry)
• Windows 7 AutoPlay Enable | Disable

3. IQueryCancelAutoPlay

• Reference for the IQueryCancelAutoPlay interface on MSDN
• IQueryCancelAutoPlay only called once? (Example implementatio, also read comments)
• AutoPlayController (another implementation, not tested)

Some other links:

• Enabling and Disabling AutoRun (MSDN article)
• Autoplay in Windows XP: Automatically Detect and React to New Devices on a System (an old but extensive article on Autoplay)