Windows 7 has a (neat?) new feature called a 'virtual wireless adapter'. Read about it here:
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090516/windows-7-native-virtual-wifi-technology-microsoft-research/
I have an application that directly controls the windows wifi interface card using the Native Wifi API ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms706556%28VS.85%29.aspx ). Please take as a given for this question that I need to directly control the wifi adapter using this documented api and can't just leave it up to OS and user.
The Windows 7 virtual adapter is supposed to be included with any approved Windows 7 wifi drivers. The drivers that out there now seem to be pretty buggy, and I've found that unless I manually disable the virtual wifi adapter the real adapter will not reliably connect to a wireless access point when commanded by the WLAN api.
My main question is 'How to I detect the presence of a windows virtual wifi adapter?'
Note that the documentation for WlanEnumInterfaces says:
This virtual device normally shows up in the “Network Connections Folder” as ‘Wireless Network Connection 2’ with a Device Name of ‘Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport adapter’ if the computer has a single wireless network adapter. This virtual device is used exclusively for performing software access point (SoftAP) connections and is not present in the list returned by the WlanEnumInterfaces function .
I suspect there is shell api that might provide the enumeration that the control panel uses to display the virtual adapter.
For extra credit, how can I disable this adapter programatically?
Thanks in advance.