vb.net - How do I determine which process is using a serial port?

Question

The company I work for makes hardware that communicates to the computer though a serial port. Third party companies write software that communicates with our hardware.

There are times when I need to diagnose our hardware. However, a third party software app connects to the serial port when Windows starts up, blocking any other connection. I don't know the name of this application/service and it's not always the same one.

Is there any way to either:

• Find the name/pid of the app/service that is currently using a given serial port or
• Steal the serial port connection from another app.

vb.net preferably, but I'll take a language agnostic answer as well.

Answer 1

You can use the process explorer tool also from SysInternals to search for open handles. In this case you would want to search for 'Serial' since it uses device names that may not map to com port numbers. (e.g. COM1 is DeviceSerial0 on my system).

If you want to take control of the serial port from another app I think you would need co-operation of the driver.