We have implemented a solution using P/Invoke which was inspired by the following article (which comes with code):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/02/10/NETSerialComm/default.aspx There is also a more recent article somewhere that has code that works for both the full and the compact frameworks. We chose to go the simple route and make only synchronous ReadFile and WriteFile calls, avoiding the extra complexity of overlapped IO. If we needed asynchronous behaviour we just ran the serial operations in their own thread. Our final port class has only a fraction of the code that they provide as we cleaned out all of the flexibility that we did not need. If you roll your own solution, make sure you test under various conditions. For instance, we found that everytime we locked our Windows session (Win-L key combination), at the point in time that we unlocked it, the serial port would throw a Win32 #995 exception. If your machine does this, you will probably want to handle it at a fairly low level. There are also other thinks you need to do to recover from comm errors such as calling PurgeCom after calling ClearCommError to properly reset the port. It was a lot of work, but we ended up with a solid serial port class. I'm looking forward to comparing it to the .NET 2.0 class. The following link also has a lot of resources: http://www.lvr.com/serport.htm Good luck. Kevin =================================== This list is hosted by DevelopMentor® http://www.develop.com View archives and manage your subscription(s) at http://discuss.develop.com
