Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Serial Port Communications with .net 1.1

Many of us (.net programmers) wonder why microsoft didnot included the serial port stuff in Visual Studio 1.1. (I found this when I have to integrate a proximity sensor to my KIOSK application to detect the motion of an object infront of the KIOSK ). Well, as I searched the web (for almost 3-4 days) I found really some useful tools, but they are of trail versions (after a period of time they will disable). So i decided to wrote my OWN serial port API to detect any kind of devices connected to the machine.
The only thing I have done was (Modifying some already existing API's) creating an API to read the events of COM ports like
1. Break,
2.Carrier Detect(CD),
3. ClearToSend(CS),
4. DataSetReady(DSR), the most powerful one to identify the events.
5. Ring,
6. RxFlag(Received Flag),
7. RxChar(Received Character),
8. StatusError,
9. TxBufferEmpty.

I found these are the enough events to achieve serial communications in .net 1.1.
If you are at any way to integrate any type of device(like sensors and intelligent devices etc.) with your application, you can achieve with this. Any way .net 2.0 and later versions are supporting the Serial Port Communication.
For any help on this post , contact me at damodara.naidu@chimeratechnologies.com or +91 988 678 2793.
MSN IM : chm_damodar@hotmail.com

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