Legacy Driver Names (Compact 2013)

3/26/2014

The legacy driver namespace, first used in earlier versions of Windows CE, constructs each device name from a device prefix and an index. Legacy names use the following format:

XXX[0-9]:

Where XXX is the three-letter prefix that represents the driver name, followed by a digit between 0 (zero) and 9 (nine) inclusive that specifies an instance index, and ending with a colon. For example, the first port on the COM serial communications driver is managed through instance index 1, which results in the name COM1:, while the second port is accessed through the name COM2:. An application opens the stream driver for the second serial port by passing its name to CreateFile:

CreateFile(L"COM2:", …)

Because the index is restricted to a single digit, only 10 device names with the same driver prefix can be accessed through the legacy driver namespace. The first driver instance corresponds to index 1, the second instance corresponds to index 2, and the ninth instance corresponds to index 9. However, the tenth instance corresponds to index 0.

The following table shows examples of legacy driver names that are currently being used.

See Also

Concepts

Device Driver Access