CommTools Question for dsummzzz

[crewchiefpro6]

I noticed you spend quite a bit of time with this library and wondered if you do much with it and VFP, or have you moved on to the Active X?

I need to rewrite some communication programs thru serial ports and I use CommTools for this, however I wondered if mscomm works any better.

Don Higgins
Crew Chief Pro Racing Software





Don Higgins

http://www.crewchiefpro.com

 

[DSummZZZ]

We have a 'legacy' app written in Fox 2.x which we use CommTools for. We don't have a version for VFP so sorry, I can't really say whether it would be better than using the mscomm control or not. They may have taken some - or even a lot - of the grunt work out of serial communications for you, but I don't know that it's a tradeoff. I think most people buy it to plug in their migrations rather than recode for the comm control.

Anyway, so far in my testing, the mscomm control has done what we've needed, but we don't have a lot of serial I/O. Mostly receipt printing and 'burning' smart cards.

I am currently in the process of rewriting that app to utilize VFP 9, but don't plan on upgrading CommTools for the VFP 9 version. The mscomm control seems to meet our requirements so far.


-Dave Summers-

Even more Fox stuff at:

http://www.davesummers.net/foxprolinks.htm

 

[crewchiefpro6]

Thank you, that is what I needed.

Don


Don Higgins

http://www.crewchiefpro.com

 

[lbfm]

DSummZZZ,

Could yo tell us a little more abotu what you do with this. This sounds very interesting.

 

[DSummZZZ]

Not much to tell really.
The receipt printing functionality just dumps a string out the serial port. I just discard replies from the printer as I don't need them.

The smart card encoding functionality does return values which I need to examine in order to determine whether or not each step of the encoding process succeeded.
Since the actual process of encoding smart cards is way beyond the scope of this thread, I won't go into any detail, but suffice it to say, the MSComm control has worked sufficiently for this.


-Dave Summers-

Even more Fox stuff at:

http://www.davesummers.net/foxprolinks.htm