What is proper way to detect all available serial ports on Windows?

Question

There are several ways to list serial ports under Windows but I\'m not sure what is the proper way: the way that does detect all serial ports that are available.

One

Answer 1

If you can access the registry, the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM key contains a list of COM ports Windows currently supports (in some cases, this information may be stale/incorrect; like, I suspect, when a plug & play device providing serial ports has not completed detection/installation or has been recently removed).

This is the way .NET Framework's SerialPort.GetPortNames() method reports available COM ports, and the above information is derived from the linked page.