The last few days I spent some time fixing the .NET UPnP stack to be more resilient. The stack itself it pretty ok, but the problem is that you do not have control over all the other UPnP devices out there. If these are faulty and don’t play by the rules, you can either ignore them (what the UPnP stack did until now) or try and handle only those parts that are ok.

Supporting for the UPnP gateway showed that several devices would simply not show up. Some fiddling with other UPnP tools and the debug facilities showed that the devices had faulty description xml’s (bad UPnP implementations by their vendors). The cases were the Grace Digital tuner and the Vera home automation box (the Grace Digital has a firmware update, beta, available that fixes the issue)

I had to take a pretty steep dive into the code to fix all the undelying elements. What happened was that the code for parsing device and service xml’s only had exception handling on the highest level. This means that you get either all or nothing. Continue reading →