How to: Control Serial Ports

It's very easy to create and control virtual serial ports. Moreover, you can connect any serial application to it. Today we will talk about the program which accomplish this task perfectly. Virtual Serial Port Control. Being an ActiveX control which makes it possible to create virtual serial ports and control them fully, the program creates virtual ports which look like as if they were real hardware serial ports for communications applications. Port Control allows you to create additional virtual serial ports directly from your own program. And any communications application can work with them as if they were physical ports.

The event driven architecture is a soft snap. You don't have to check ports periodically in order to find whether their state is changed or new data is available for reading from the virtual port. Just define the needed function in your program that will be triggered automatically by the appropriate event and that will process the data.

At the same time the Virtual Serial Port Control immediately notifies your application about any actions done to the serial port by the communications application (port opening/closing, setting DTR/RTS handshake, baudrate setting, XON/XOFF symbols setting, etc).

Main program's features at a glance:

• Virtual serial ports look and work like real COM ports.
• Unlimited number of virtual COM ports can be created.
• Virtual serial ports can have the same names as existing hardware COM ports (e.g. COM1).
• Powerful and intuitive interface to make serial port communications easy.
• Delivers all the capabilities of the Win32 Serial Communications API.
• Notifies your application when data arrives or events occur on the port.
• Supports reading and writing of binary data.
• Full buffered data transfer.
• Comes with example applications (Visual Basic, Visual C++).
• Can be redistributed as part of your application.

The program is compatible with full Microsoft serial.sys, PnP and WMI technologies, Hyper-Threading Technology, VMware, Serial data bitrate (transmission speed) emulation, Virtual serial ports configuration via Windows Device Manager.