I am hoping to receive some general guidance on accomplishing a seemingly simple goal. I have a DSLR camera (Canon EOS 50D) and need to write an application that will tell the camera to take a picture. I also need to transfer the picture to the computer and possibly delete it from the camera's storage. A bonus would be to get a live preview from the camera in my application. My environment will be Windows (either XP Pro or Vista Enterprise) and .Net 3.5 (C#).

I have done some research and found a couple of options. One I know will work, but limits me to using only Canon cameras in the future. I have found and downloaded an SDK from Canon that provides a lot of this functionality. I've looked over the SDK and while it's extensive and written in C it does have C# wrappers that will speed up development a bit.

Another option I've found is called Windows Portable Devices. Apparently, it is an API that will talk to devices that implement PTP and MTP standards. It is COM based and as far as I can tell it has no .Net wrappers. This is not however a show stopper. I could P/Invoke the functionality I need or write a Managed C++ DLL to use in my application to talk to the camera.

I am looking for anyone with experience with WPD to give me pointers. I've perused the documentation and seen references to transferring images and deleting images. I have not, however, seen mention of commands to take a picture, get a preview image, or say focus/auto-focus.