Question

I’m writing an application that communicates by sending bytes to the USB port. I’d like to allow the user to choose the port and to do that, I use SerialPort.GetPortNames(). Unfortunately, it returns an empty array. The method supposedly reads the registry for data (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM), but the SERIALCOMM directory is missing. When I run the program on Linux, it lists my four USB ports, as expected. How can I fix the registry/discover the ports in a different way?

Answer 1

The SerialPort.GetPortNames() are the correct method to discover serial ports. But if you are using Windows 7, I think it could be issues with permissions on the registry keys this method lists. I found a post which describe this problem at Microsoft.com.