Question

I am not able to see mounted drive using WNetAddConnection2W in Windows Service written in VC++

When i debug the service it returns success but when i open explorer to see that mounted drive it is not there.
I am doing this in Windows service where my service is running in administartor previliages.
My code looks like :

    lpNetResource->lpRemoteName = L"\\\\172.24.18.240\\praveena\\CIFS";
    lpNetResource->lpLocalName = L"Z:"; 
dwRetVal = WNetAddConnection2W(lpNetResource, wcpPassword, wcpUserName, CONNECT_UPDATE_RECENT); 

When i use the same code in MFC Application it works fine.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

When the drive is added or removed in another session (as it happens in case of Windows services), Explorer doesn’t have a way to know about this.

To solve this problem in our Callback File System library, which creates virtual drives (and users do this from services), we have implemented a special shell extension DLL.
This DLL listens to signals sent by the user-mode code which performs disk creation (and which is executed in service context). When the DLL receives the signal, it broadcasts WM_DEVICECHANGE system message. Then Explorer catches this message and rescans device list.