Function Instances

[Function Discovery is available for use in the following versions of Windows: Windows Server 2012, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Vista. It may be altered or unavailable in subsequent versions.]

Function Discovery provides interfaces for discovering function instances and receiving notification events related to changes.

Function instances are created as the result of a query operation (see IFunctionInstanceQuery). They represent a static view of a resource at that moment in time.

Function instance collections contain a collection of function instances. These collections support basic enumeration. For more information, see IFunctionInstanceCollection.

A function instance exposes the following groups of information:

identity

The identity of a function instance uniquely identifies the instance. This identifier is a null-terminated Unicode string. An application can save this string and use it at a later time to find the same resource.

See IFunctionInstance::GetID.

metadata

The metadata represents properties and capabilities. It includes information such as the display name, icon, and installation date. This information is exposed through the IPropertyStore interface. Each discovery provider has different capabilities, and so may be able to retrieve different subsets of properties.

See IFunctionInstance::OpenPropertyStore.

query service

Function instances expose a collection of interfaces that can be used to the device- or resource-specific programming interfaces. Instances only expose interfaces that they directly support. For example, a PnP function instance exposes one or more file paths that can be opened to communicate with the device driver. COM components expose interfaces that the component supports.

See IFunctionInstance::QueryService.