How does Arduino IDE 'Get Board Info'? I want my C# application to automatically select the correct COM port by way of a string equality check against a 'GetInfo'-type request to the Arduino board.     

I know the Arduino IDE can get info from the board;     

Tools &gt; GetBoardInfo     



But I don't know how to get it using a sketch or if it is even possible for that matter.

Is this something that can be read from the board, or is it a USB-thing. If it's a USB thing, I'd have to get the info from GetUSBDevices.DeviceID or whatever, then get the serial port used by the USB Device, which would probably work, but I'd rather do it all via a serialPort.
Looking at the source code of the Arduino IDE on github, it looks like they call an executable (listComPorts.exe). So I would guess you can't get that info through serial.

Here's a C# app using WMI that can get port, vid, and pid:

namespace PortTest
{
    class Program
    {
        // Helper function to handle regex search
        static string regex(string pattern, string text)
        {
            Regex re = new Regex(pattern);
            Match m = re.Match(text);
            if (m.Success)
            {
                return m.Value;
            }
            else
            {
                return null;
            }
        }

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // Use WMI to get info
            ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher("root\\CIMV2",
                "SELECT * FROM Win32_PnPEntity WHERE ClassGuid=\"{4d36e978-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\"");

            // Search all serial ports
            foreach (ManagementObject queryObj in searcher.Get())
            {
                // Parse the data
                if (null != queryObj["Name"])
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("Port = " + regex(@"(\(COM\d+\))", queryObj["Name"].ToString()));
                }
                //PNPDeviceID = USB\VID_1A86&amp;PID_7523\5&amp;1A63D808&amp;0&amp;2
                if (null != queryObj["PNPDeviceID"])
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("VID = " + regex("VID_([0-9a-fA-F]+)", queryObj["PNPDeviceID"].ToString()));
                    Console.WriteLine("PID = " + regex("PID_([0-9a-fA-F]+)", queryObj["PNPDeviceID"].ToString()));
                }
            }
            Console.WriteLine("Done");
            int c = Console.Read();
        }
    }
}


From there, it looks like it searches an online database for more info. See: getBoardWithMatchingVidPidFromCloud() function.