How to detect and disable Windows 7 virtual Wi-Fi adapter

Question

Windows 7 has a new option (tidy?) Called the "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 manages a Windows Wi-Fi interface card using the Native Wifi API ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms706556%28VS.85%29.aspx ). Please take as a question asked for this that I need to directly control the wifi adapter using this documented api, and cannot just leave it for the OS and user.

It is assumed that the Windows 7 virtual adapter will be included with any approved Windows 7 Wi-Fi drivers. The drivers that seem pretty distorted there now, and I found that if I did not manually disconnect the Wi-Fi virtual adapter, the real adapter would not be reliable Connect to a wireless access point when the WLAN api will be controlled.

My main question is: "How to determine if a Windows virtual Wi-Fi adapter is available?"

Note that the documentation for WlanEnumInterfaces says:

This virtual device is usually displayed in the “Network Connection Panel” as “Wireless Network Connection 2 with Device Name for Microsoft Virtual WiFi Minor adapter if the computer has one wireless network adapter. This virtual device is used exclusively for running Access Point (SoftAP) programs and not in the list returned by the WlanEnumInterfaces function.

I suspect there is an api shell that can provide an enumeration that the control panel uses to display the virtual adapter.

For more information, how can I disable this adapter programmatically?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

To detect a Windows 7 virtual adapter using the WLAN api, you need to use the wlanapi.h version in the Windows SDK version 6.1.

You can enable or disable network adapters using WMI or the COM INetConnection COM interface defined in netcon.h.

Answer 2

In the control panel> Network and Internet, there is an option that says: "Add a wireless device." I used this to detect microsoft virtual Wi-Fi virtual mini adapter, because after installing Windows 7 it did not appear in network adapters, but it was there and turned on but not running. To disable it from the command line run as administrator, you can try: netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode = disallow (or disabled, I have not tried). See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd815243%28VS.85%29.aspx

Answer 3

Windows command: netsh wlan show hostnetwork