Checking which Com Ports are free

Is the only way to see which Com Ports are open and available for use by polling each one?

I am quite new to programming related to Com Ports and the original way I was going to tackle it was by just trying each Com Port like this on each Com Port until 10.

Code:

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hPort = CreateFile(L"COM9", GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE, 0, 0, OPEN_EXISTING, 0, 0);

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Any suggestions or advice? Would greatly appreciate it.

Here is my current code but trying all the COM Ports from 1-9 seems to only return an error and I'm not sure what's going on.

Code:

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#include <string>#include <Windows.h>
#include <conio.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <sstream>


int main(){
   
    //std::string com = "\\\\.\\COM";
    std::string com = "COM";
    std::string portname;
    HANDLE hCom;


    for( int i = 1; i<10; i++)
    {
        std::stringstream sstm;
        std::cout << "Trying "<< i<<"\n";
        sstm << com << i;
        portname = sstm.str();
        TCHAR *szPort = (TCHAR*)(portname.c_str());
        //TCHAR *szPort = TEXT(port);
        //wsprintf( szPort, "COM%d", nPort );


        hCom = CreateFile(szPort,
                            GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE,
                            0,
                            NULL,
                            OPEN_EXISTING,
                            FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL | FILE_FLAG_OVERLAPPED,
                            NULL);
        if (hCom == INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE)
        {
            DWORD err=GetLastError();
            std::cout << "Failed\n";
        }
        else
        {
            std::cout << i << " Didn't Fail o.o";
            CloseHandle(hCom);
        }
    }
    return 0;
}

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> TCHAR *szPort = (TCHAR*)(portname.c_str());
If TCHAR really is a wide character, then you need to do more than simply casting a pointer.

Have a look here. Scroll down to the section on accessing ports under windows. Keep going down until you find some code by someone called Peter Burke (which works under both win95 and NT families).

That should get you started.