External I/O in Visual Studio 2005

Sojourner · Sep 22, 2006, 07:48 AM

Anybody know where I can find instruction topics on getting data from external devices in C# programming via VS2005? Help library and google searches have turned up very little. I'd be quite happy to learn for myself without bugging people if only I could find the bloody material.

I'm particularly thinking about (very retro) parallel and serial port-based data logging devices for a scientific graphing application. I did find a couple of articles on parallel ports, but the writer's english was so bad I couldn't figure out what he was using and why.

Scar_T · Oct 23, 2006, 08:47 PM

Under Windows XP/2000 you can't freely access to port from an user application, you need to use a driver. You can use IO.dll (http://www.geekhideout.com/iodll.shtml) for that purpose, it is free (for non commercial usage) and it has examples for using it with VB and VC++.

I hope you can use it with C# aswell, unfortunately I don't know too much about this language so I can't tell you how to use it in from a C# application.

Sojourner · Nov 3, 2006, 04:06 PM

Thanks - that's the kind of answer I was looking for. It does explain why I'm finding these things so complicated. It's going to take a bit of effort to work out how to use this .dll, though, as I'm a real programming rookie.