USB and a personal-created device interfacing in Windows using C/C++

I know how to interface using the parallel port and also have a little idea on serial port interfacing. But is there a way to interface using the USB port in Windows? Or any links that would give tutorials on how to do this?

Specifically, I wanted to know the programming side of it.

I don't know how to start. I have searched into google but I have not seen any code samples.

Thanks in adv开发者_如何学Goance and Happy New Year.

USB programming is considerably more complex than serial or parallel port programming. For writing USB drivers for Windows, you'll probably need the Windows WDK. However, for a device you build yourself you can start with implementing a serial port class driver in your device, so that it shows up as a new serial port in Windows. The HID is another potentially useful driver class, generally used for some kind of input device.

I would recommend a good book if you want to do USB programming, for example Jan Axelson's USB Complete. And a real hardware protocol analyser is indispensable.

Found an interesting blog post http://yeohhs.blogspot.com/2006/08/programming-usb-port.html it mentions a library 'libusb' and a wrapper for the same. The library is a GNU project. The library and documentation of the same may prove useful. The API documentation of libusb is here: http://libusb.sourceforge.net/api-1.0/