PuTTY wish win-enum-serial-ports

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summary: Enumerate serial ("COM") ports on Windows
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.
priority: medium: This should be fixed one day.

A common request is that PuTTY gains a drop-down list of available serial ports, so that (e.g.) you don't have to find out by other means that the USB-to-serial dongle you've just plugged in has decided to call itself COM5. Other Windows programs using serial ports can do this.

Cursory research suggests there isn't a single good way to do this; a common library for this (CEnumerateSerial) uses 9(!) different methods for this, which can produce a mix of false negatives and positives. (See also this StackOverflow answer.)

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Audit trail for this wish.

(last revision of this bug record was at 2017-02-28 23:25:21 +0000)