Working with USB devices in .NET

Question

Using .Net (C#), how can you work with USB devices?

How can you detect USB events (connections/disconnections) and how do you communicate with devices (read/write).

Answer 1

I tried several of these suggestions with no luck. I ended up writing a working solution using Java and the hid4java library. As a console app I can shell out to it from C# using Process.Start(), passing parameters as well as reading responses. This provides basic HID I/O but without connect/disconnect events. For that I'd need to rewrite it to run as a daemon/service and use named pipes or some other server/client transport. For now, it's enough to get the job done since the hi4java library "just works".