Detect external devices insertion on Windows - c++

Question

I'm a little bit confused about how to notify my c++ application with event that the user has plugged in a device (USB, HID etc.). Application type is not defined. I'm trying to play around with console/message-only/service example apps, but there is no result. I'm using VS2015 and Windows 10.
I've found out that there are multiple ways to deal with it:
Using WMI like here. But I can not actually understand where is WMI here.
Using RegisterDeviceNotification and WM_DEVICECHANGE. As far as I can understand, there is no way to do that for the console applications, only for once with the GUI (real window) or for the message-only window. I've tried the last one with the example from this answer but my app doesn't receive any notifications when I plug in my USB flash drive. I've found this answer (from the same question as the answer mentioned above) and tried to use ChangeWindowMessageFilterEx() function with GetProcAddress from user32.dll to load it without connection dll to my app in such way:
BOOL InitInstance(HWND hWnd)
{
HMODULE hDll = GetModuleHandle(TEXT("user32.dll"));
if (hDll)
{
typedef BOOL(WINAPI *MESSAGEFILTERFUNCEX)(HWND hWnd, UINT message, DWORD action, VOID* pChangeFilterStruct);
const DWORD MSGFLT_ALLOW = 1;
MESSAGEFILTERFUNCEX ChangeWindowMessageFilterEx= (MESSAGEFILTERFUNCEX)::GetProcAddress(hDll, "ChangeWindowMessageFilterEx");
if (ChangeWindowMessageFilterEx) return func(hWnd, WM_COPYDATA, MSGFLT_ALLOW, NULL);
}
return FALSE; }
And the usage of this function is:
hWnd = CreateWindowEx(0, CLS_NAME, "DevNotifWnd", WS_ICONIC,
0, 0, CW_USEDEFAULT, 0, HWND_MESSAGE,
NULL, GetModuleHandle(0), (void*)&guid);
InitInstance(hWnd);
But there is no effect.
Using while(true){...} loop and call appropriate Win API functions like in this answer. But this way seems not be a perfect solution for my problem.
My questions are:
Could anybody explain me what is the best way? And if it is the second one with RegisterDeviceNotification, why it's not working in case of message-only window app?
Do other ways exist? And if not, what can I do, for example, to notify application when some certain software was installed?
Any comments are appreciated.

Answer 1

So I've finally found sort of answers to the questions.
The issue was with the GUID I've provided for the NotificationFilter. So I've set it to receive notifications from all devices with this code:
DEV_BROADCAST_DEVICEINTERFACE NotificationFilter;
ZeroMemory(&NotificationFilter, sizeof(NotificationFilter));
NotificationFilter.dbcc_size = sizeof(DEV_BROADCAST_DEVICEINTERFACE);
NotificationFilter.dbcc_devicetype = DBT_DEVTYP_DEVICEINTERFACE;
// No need to set up dbcc_classguid as it is ignored when
// DEVICE_NOTIFY_ALL_INTERFACE_CLASSES is setted (see line down below)
HDEVNOTIFY dev_notify = RegisterDeviceNotification(hwnd, &NotificationFilter, DEVICE_NOTIFY_ALL_INTERFACE_CLASSES);
As far as for other types of notifications in windows that the app could sign up for, I found only one partially deprecated list of all Win32 API functions, where I found some new Notifications with Ctrl+F search :)
Hope this could save somebody's time.