Development

Welcome to the DigiSwipe support section.  Here there are links to writing applications which use the Com port for various Microsoft Windows environments.  If new to serial communications, then it is strongly suggested to purchase Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications, 4th Edition - It can be purchased from the publisher at  www.mabry.com and contains great source code material. We use the CFSerialIO component written by the author of this book for PocketPC 2002 & 2003 environments. 

Accessing Serial Ports from the .NET
Links to good articles/sample code

Serial Ports in Visual Studio 2008 .NET 3.5 (Windows Mobile 6)

SmartDevice SerialPort CardSwipe Code Example
Nice example from Lanse Larsen which takes advantage of the SerialPort class in .NET (present in .NET 2,3 and 3.5).  Lance provides source code for Visual Studio 2008.  Code runs on a HP 2790 Pocket PC with our DigiSwipe CF card reader. 

Serial Ports in Visual Studio 2005 .NET 2.0 (Tablets/Laptops/Desktops)

Visual Studio 2005 has a new Serial Port control that is part of .NET 2.0 and is freely available in C# Express on MSDN. It is considerably easier to use and is a true .NET component.

There is a sample application, SerialPort Terminal, written by Noah Coad which you can try out to see how the new SerialPort control is used. Since Visual Studio 2005 / .NET 2.0 is just being introduced, you will need to compile the app on your system before running it.

Serial Ports in .NET 2003 Framework (Tablets/Laptops/Desktops)

• HOW TO: Access Serial Ports and Parallel Ports by Using Microsoft Visual Basic .NET   Detailed article from Microsoft.  It is a bit complex compared to other approaches using off the shelf components but purist may appreciate it.
• Serial Communications : The .NET Way Article at Codeproject.com which includes source code and components to ease accessing com ports.
• Serial COM Simply in C# Good article which uses MSComm OCX that is included with VB in Visual Studio 6 (and previous versions). You must have at least the ActiveX components of VS6 installed in order to use MSComm because it is a licensed control.
• Use P/Invoke to Develop a .NET Base Class Library for Serial Device Communications   Article from Microsoft which provides an alternative to using MSComm control - Summary The only way of coding RS232 serial communications applications in the .NET environment is to import the outdated and somewhat limited MSComm ActiveX control. This article describes the development of a lean, multithreaded, and modern RS232 base class library in C# managed code. The library uses Platform Invocation Services to interact with the Win32 API directly. Application programmers can use the library from any .NET language through inheritance; the article explores examples written in C# and Visual Basic .NET.

Tested Compatible PocketPC PDAs

Below is a partial list of PocketPC PDAs which DigiSwipe has been tested with.  Because the DigiSwipe becomes a new serial port in the PocketPC, it will work in any PocketPC or Windows CE device with a Type II Compact Flash Slot.  The only known issue was with early versions of Windows Mobile 5 devices with bugs in the Windows Mobile 5 code.   Early versions of Windows Mobile 5 code had several bugs in the code which controlled the CompactFlash slot.  Dell issued updates in March of 2006 to address these issues.  Customers with early versions of Windows Mobile 5 operating systems should update to the latest version.  Dell has a free update for AXIM X51 devices - See Dell Windows Mobile 5 update.

Download the Flash Player.