IMAPI version 2 managed wrapper.

Introduction

Microsoft introduced native image mastering support in Vista, going forward. The library itself is not too complex but the latest version of the image mastering API (IMAPI) has some quirks. This is well documented by Eric Haddan in his article describing how to build an interop file and use it from .NET.

Implementation

I wanted to take it a step further and provide a library wrapper that was CLI compliant. The end result is a class that provides 3 methods, called in order, to burn an image. The project can be found on my GitHub account.

Properties

• Media: A read only property that populates after the LoadMedia call and reports what type of physical media is connected (eg. CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, etc.).
• MediaStates: A read only collection of states in which the media is under, that populates after the LoadMedia call (eg. is blank, overwriteable, unsupported).
• MediaCapacity: A read only property that populates after the LoadMedia call and reports the size capacity of the media.
• Nodes: A root list of file and directory nodes that are to be written to the media.
• Recorders: A read only selectable collection. A recorder must be selected for the LoadRecorder call.
• VolumeLabel: A property that sets the volume label of the media to be written to.

Methods

• LoadRecorder: Verifies a recorder is selected, loads the recording drive resources and verifies that it is working.
• LoadMedia: Loads the media resource and verifies that it is valid for the recorder. An exception will occur if the media isn't supported (eg. closed session disc, no disc present).
• FormatMedia: Formats the media of any previous data.
• WriteImage: The final step to write your files to disc. This is a blocking call.

Events

• FormatEraseUpdate: Reports progress of FormatMedia call.
• FormatWriteUpdate: Reports progress of files being written to the media.
• ImageUpdate: Reports progress of files being added to the media image.

Caveats

I use this library for the simple single purpose of writing finalized images to a blank CD. It has not been fully tested to accomodate all media and recorder state scenarios; I haven't tried it yet with DVD's or multi-session discs. If you would like to extend the library, feel free to push some changes to the GitHub project and I will wrap them in.

I decided to leave the method calls as blocking (synchronous) since there could be many different synchronization models that may use this library. For my purposes, I used this in an WPF application that would call the WriteImage method from a Task and then post back the progress events of the write using the Dispatcher from my WPF window. Below is a code snippet demonstrating this.

private ImageMaster _burner;

...

private void _CreateCd()
{
 // files added to _burner and _burner.WriteImage called
}

private void _burner_FormatWriteUpdate(IMAPI2.ImageMaster sender, IMAPI2.FormatWriteUpdateEventArgs e)
{
 this.Dispatcher.Invoke(() => this.statusProgressBar.Value == (e.ElapsedTime / e.TotalTime) * 100);
}

private void CreateCdWindow_Loaded(object sender, System.Windows.RoutedEventArgs e)
{
 System.Threading.Tasks.Task.Factory.StartNew(_CreateCd);
}