Monday, September 02, 2013

Burning and Erasing CD/DVD/Blu-ray Media with C# and IMAPI2

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Introduction
Windows introduced the new IMAPIv2.0 with the release of the Vista Operating System which was a big improvement over the original IMAPI. The original IMAPI is great for CDROMs, but it has some huge limitations like not being able to write to DVD media. I am sure this limitation is due to almost nobody having a DVD writer when Windows XP was released back in 2001. IMAPIv2 allows you to write to CD, DVD, and even Blu-ray media, as well as read and write ISO files. IMAPIv2.0 had a problem since it was only available with Windows Vista. But in June of 2007, Microsoft released update packages for Windows XP and Windows 2003. You can download the updates here.

To use the features added in the Windows Feature Pack for Storage 1.0, you need to download the update here. Windows Vista Service Pack 2 already includes the update.

I wrote this article as a sequel to my C++ article, Burning CD/DVD Media with the Image Mastering API Version 2.0. Most of the IMAPI2 samples seem to be in scripting languages. The only C# sample I found was the IBurn console project that came with the Windows Vista SDK, and more recently, the article: How to Create Optical File Images using IMAPIv2.0 by dmihailescu, which shows you how to create an ISO file.

This article was more difficult than I had thought it would be. Normally, .NET applications are supposed to be easier, but there were a number of issues that I needed to figure out to get this to work. If you're not interested in hearing me rant and rave, you can skip over the next section.

Read more: Codeproject
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