Welcome to my tutorial on Serial Port Communication in C#. Lately Ive seen a lot of questions on how to send and receive data through a serial port, so I thought it was time to write on the topic. Back in the days of Visual Basic 6.0, you had to use the MSComm Control that was shipped with VB6, the only problem with this method was you needed to make sure you included that control in your installation package, not really that big of a deal. The control did exactly what was needed for the task.
We were then introduced to .Net 1.1, VB programmers loved the fact that Visual Basic had finally evolved to an OO language. It was soon discovered that, with all it's OO abilities, the ability to communicate via a serial port wasn't available, so once again VB developers were forced to rely on the MSComm Control from previous versions of Visual Basic, still not that big of a deal, but some were upset that an intrinsic way of serial port communication wasn't offered with the .net Framework. Worse yet, C# developers had to rely on a Visual Basic control and Namespace if they wanted to communicate via serial port.
Then along comes .Net 2.0, and this time Microsoft added the System.IO.Ports Namespace, and within that was the SerialPort Class. DotNet developers finally had an intrinsic way of serial port communication, without having to deal with the complexities of interoping with an old legacy ActiveX OCX control. One of the most useful methods in the SerialPort class is the GetPortNames Method. This allows you to retrieve a list of available ports (COM1,COM2,etc.) available for the computer the application is running on.
Now that we have that out of the way, lets move on to programming our application. As with all application I create, I keep functionality separated from presentation, I do this by creating Manager classes that manage the functionality for a given process. What we will be looking at is the code in my CommunicationManager class. As with anything you write in .Net you need to add the references to the Namespace's you'll be using:
using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Drawing;
using System.IO.Ports;
In this application I wanted to give the user the option of what format they wanted to send the message in, either string or binary, so we have an enumeration for that, and an enumerations for the type of message i.e; Incoming, Outgoing, Error, etc. The main purpose of this enumeration is for changing the color of the text displayed to the user according to message type. Here are the enumerations:
#region Manager Enums
/// <summary>
/// enumeration to hold our transmission types
/// </summary>
public enum TransmissionType { Text, Hex }
/// <summary>
/// enumeration to hold our message types
/// </summary>
public enum MessageType { Incoming, Outgoing, Normal, Warning, Error };
We were then introduced to .Net 1.1, VB programmers loved the fact that Visual Basic had finally evolved to an OO language. It was soon discovered that, with all it's OO abilities, the ability to communicate via a serial port wasn't available, so once again VB developers were forced to rely on the MSComm Control from previous versions of Visual Basic, still not that big of a deal, but some were upset that an intrinsic way of serial port communication wasn't offered with the .net Framework. Worse yet, C# developers had to rely on a Visual Basic control and Namespace if they wanted to communicate via serial port.
Then along comes .Net 2.0, and this time Microsoft added the System.IO.Ports Namespace, and within that was the SerialPort Class. DotNet developers finally had an intrinsic way of serial port communication, without having to deal with the complexities of interoping with an old legacy ActiveX OCX control. One of the most useful methods in the SerialPort class is the GetPortNames Method. This allows you to retrieve a list of available ports (COM1,COM2,etc.) available for the computer the application is running on.
Now that we have that out of the way, lets move on to programming our application. As with all application I create, I keep functionality separated from presentation, I do this by creating Manager classes that manage the functionality for a given process. What we will be looking at is the code in my CommunicationManager class. As with anything you write in .Net you need to add the references to the Namespace's you'll be using:
using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Drawing;
using System.IO.Ports;
In this application I wanted to give the user the option of what format they wanted to send the message in, either string or binary, so we have an enumeration for that, and an enumerations for the type of message i.e; Incoming, Outgoing, Error, etc. The main purpose of this enumeration is for changing the color of the text displayed to the user according to message type. Here are the enumerations:
#region Manager Enums
/// <summary>
/// enumeration to hold our transmission types
/// </summary>
public enum TransmissionType { Text, Hex }
/// <summary>
/// enumeration to hold our message types
/// </summary>
public enum MessageType { Incoming, Outgoing, Normal, Warning, Error };