EnumDisplayDevices vs WMI Win32_DesktopMonitor, how to detect active monitors?

Question

For my current C++ project I need to detect a unique string for every monitor that is connected and active on a large number of computers.

Research has pointed to 2

Answer 1

We've been toying with EnumDisplayDevices in order to detect if the current video card manufacturer is NVIDIA. It's not the same, but maybe it would help. Our piece looked like this:

int disp_num = 0;
    BOOL res = TRUE;
    do {
        DISPLAY_DEVICE disp_dev_info; 
        ZeroMemory( &disp_dev_info, sizeof(DISPLAY_DEVICE) );
        disp_dev_info.cb = sizeof(DISPLAY_DEVICE);
        res = EnumDisplayDevices( 0, disp_num++, &disp_dev_info, 0x00000001 );
        if(res &&
           disp_dev_info.DeviceString[0]!=0 && disp_dev_info.DeviceString[0]=='N' &&
           disp_dev_info.DeviceString[1]!=0 && disp_dev_info.DeviceString[1]=='V' && 
           disp_dev_info.DeviceString[2]!=0 && disp_dev_info.DeviceString[2]=='I' && 
           disp_dev_info.DeviceString[3]!=0 && disp_dev_info.DeviceString[3]=='D' && 
           disp_dev_info.DeviceString[4]!=0 && disp_dev_info.DeviceString[4]=='I' && 
           disp_dev_info.DeviceString[5]!=0 && disp_dev_info.DeviceString[5]=='A'){
            isNVidia = true;
        }
        int x = 0;
    }while( res != FALSE );

Pretty dumb, but working.