Serial or COM port access?

[Hapkidoin]

Greetings all. I have a question about an application that I'm thinking about, so I searched the forums for answers. Unfortunately, the most recent posts that came up were from 2003 so I thought I would post here to try to get current information and possibly some input from more experienced programmers. I would still consider myself a rookie, but not quite a newbie, and I know there's a *huge* amount of knowledge out there on this forum.

I am looking at writing an application that would be used as a time clock for our employees. (We have some weird rules about rounding certain types of time and not others, so no "out of the box" app will work the way we want it to.) My problem is that our time clock sounds a buzzer at certain times of the day to signal to go to work, to clean up before the end of the work period, to go to break, etc. I need some way to connect some sort of buzzer to the PC and send out a signal at the appropriate times.

My first thought was a buzzer connected to a serial or COM port, but I don't know how to send a signal to either of those and I couldn't find any relevant information anywhere. Anyone out there with some suggestions on the current state of interfacing with these ports and/or suggestions for some other (better) way to do it?

Thank you in advance for your help!

Shaun M. Fortune

[Phil Weber]

Nothing has changed since 2003 when it comes to accessing serial ports from .NET: If you have MSComm.ocx from a previous version of Visual Basic, you can use it. Otherwise, you'll have to use a third-party component or Win32 API calls. If you search Google for "c# serial port", you'll find numerous examples (many of them in VB.NET).