Ports

[Bill Fosbrook]

I write software to drive thermal barcoding printers that mostly use a serial
port connection. Serial is preferred to parallel because of it's ability
to send data back from the printer for flow control and status functions.
I use the standard VB comm control.

Now I have begun to hear about two way parallel ports and also something
caled a USB port. Can these be used in Visual Basic ?

[Dan Appleman]

I'd say it's probably possible, but I've never done it myself. A quick look
through MSDN didn't show
any generic USB code, though there is a section on writing USB drivers (it's
possible you need a
driver to use USB).

Dan


"Bill Fosbrook" <billf@iafrica.com> wrote:
>
>I write software to drive thermal barcoding printers that mostly use a serial
>port connection. Serial is preferred to parallel because of it's ability
>to send data back from the printer for flow control and status functions.
>I use the standard VB comm control.
>
>Now I have begun to hear about two way parallel ports and also something
>caled a USB port. Can these be used in Visual Basic ?
>

[Larry Lotito]

>"Bill Fosbrook" <billf@iafrica.com> wrote:
>>
>>I write software to drive thermal barcoding printers that mostly use a
serial
>>port connection. Serial is preferred to parallel because of it's ability
>>to send data back from the printer for flow control and status functions.....>>

I also write printing systems software using thermal printers, and have researched
the parallel vs. serial issue for years. The only solution I found (several
years ago) was an assembly language routine that looked directly at the port
and returned the control bit status to VB.

This worked, but unfortunately the detailed status information I was looking
for, eg. paper out, ribbon out, etc., was only provided on the serial port
by any of the numerous thermal printers I tested. None of them provided
this level of staus information on the parallel port.