Windows Portable Devices

Windows Portable Devices is a new way for a computer to communicate with attached media and storage devices. This system supersedes both Windows Media Device Manager and Windows Image Acquisition by providing a flexible, robust way for a computer to communicate with music players, storage devices, mobile phones, cameras, and many other types of connected devices.

Applications built on Windows Portable Devices can explore a device, send and receive content, and even control the device—for example, take a picture or send a text message. The system is designed to be flexible—so that many types of devices can be explored—and extensible—so that driver developers can define their own custom properties and commands for custom devices.

Applications built on Windows Media Device Manager or Windows Image Acquisition can access Windows Portable Devices through a compatibility layer.

Microsoft provides several drivers for standard protocols and devices, including Media Transport Protocol (MTP) devices and Mass Storage Class (MSC) devices. If you are familiar with the User-Mode Driver Framework, you can develop your own drivers for custom devices.

The following table lists the main topics of this documentation.

Topic	Description
General Requirements for Application Development	Hardware and software requirements to develop drivers and applications using Windows Portable Devices.
Requirements for Windows Media DRM-Enabled Applications	Properties that are required to enable Windows Media DRM-protected content transfers.
Sample	Description of the command-line desktop application that is supplied with this software development kit.
Application Overview	Key concepts used in Windows Portable Devices.
Programming Guide	Key tasks that a driver or application will perform, with step-by-step instructions and code snippets.
Programming Reference	The reference guide to all the interfaces and data types defined by Windows Portable Devices.

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